Battle Fantasia: Unity
by Darth Artemis
Summary: "Strange, isn't it? We've always said we weren't alone, and yet nobody ever realized just how literally true that was." Part 1 of Battle Fantasia, the Magical Girl Megacross.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** The Battle Fantasia Project does not own any of the licensed materials or related characters found within these pages. Akiko Yamaguchi and all related original characters are property of AngryDesu. All other original characters and concepts are property of their respective creators.

_**Battle Fantasia: Unity**_

**Authored by** AngryDesu and the Battle Fantasia Project

**Hosted by** Darth Artemis

**BATTLE FANTASIA**

It was strange that the only thing she could think about as the elevator rose was the question of if her mother had read her will yet. She had posted it through her parent's letterbox only an hour or so ago before she had gone and caught the train to central Tokyo. She wondered if her parents had even bothered to read the letter... or if they had simply tossed it aside like they had with her - their delinquent daughter.

She had quite a while to think on the subject as the elevator took a long time to reach its highest floor. Hardly surprising given it was located a good three hundred feet off the ground, half-way up the as yet incomplete Tokyo Sky Tower. She had chosen this place because it was prominent and being under construction meant that at this time of the day it was relatively abandoned. Admittedly she had needed to use every bit of her skill to sneak into the place to begin with but once inside she had been able to avoid most of the workers as they were clocking off for the evening.

Eventually the lift came to a stop and she was forced to walk the rest of the way up because the next lift was a construction one she couldn't work out how to use. The stairs would take her another three hundred or so feet up and were she a normal person she would have likely collapsed of exhaustion half-way.

But she wasn't normal - that was why she was here.

It didn't take her too long to reach the upper floors of the tower, not when she was capable of leaping up whole staircases in one jump. Even so she was panting heavily when she reached the top and the chained door which led out onto the sky high construction site that was building the tower ever higher. The chains and locks were pretty easy to get though and within moment she was standing outside on a vast ledge looking out over the city so far below.

Carefully she reached into a pocket and pulled out a pink cellphone. Earlier she had used it, unsuccessfully, to try and contact someone - anyone - who could convince her that her plan was one she shouldn't go through with... but that wasn't what she was going to use it for now. Staring out at the horizon she took a deep breath and dialed a number and held the phone to her ear.

There was no backing out now.

"Hello? Tokyo Police Force?" She said with a false cheer that simply did not match her dead-seeming eyes. "I'd like to report a suicide jumper. Yes, that's right. Uh-huh. Where?"

She sniffled slightly. "She's at the top of the Tokyo Sky Tower."

The call finished she closed her phone and raised one arm to wipe at her eyes with her sleeve. Then she opened her phone again and dialed in a new number.

"Is this the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation? I'd like to report a story in progress..."

**BATTLE FANTASIA**

It wasn't long until she heard the helicopters approaching; a quick check of her cell told her it had taken almost fifteen minutes. She smirked darkly at that, had she been here for the reason she had called them then they would have come too late... but she needed them, needed the cameras the news helicopter carried.

It was hard to explain why she hadn't just gone through with things, why she was putting on the big production she had in mind... but in the end it came down to the fact that she needed to be seen, needed to let everyone know.

It was the only thing she could do now.

She stood up from where she had been sitting against a wall, face buried against her knees. Picking herself up she took a few unsteady steps towards the edge of the ledge and wiped at her eyes and face with a now terribly damp sleeve. She winced slightly as both helicopters let loose with floodlights to illuminate her and a good chunk of the building she stood on.

She tried hard not to cringe in fear - she remembered the last time she had been blinded by bright lights like this... it was not a pleasant memory.

The police helicopter was yelling something to her over a speaker but she ignored it in favor of glancing down at her cellphone, which she had already set to pick up the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation, or as it was better known the NHK, broadcast.

Though tiny it was easy to make out that what was on the screen was a live feed from the news camera.

The future, one way or another, was here.

**BATTLE FANTASIA**

It would be broadcast upon television sets all over the country watched by hundreds, even thousands of people - and with luck the video would hit the internet and be seen by _millions_.

Just as she had wanted.

She stepped forward, putting the edge of the ledge and the horrifyingly long drop beyond it literally an inch from her feet. The height didn't scare her as she had enough things she feared already, rather it represented an end to her fears - one way or another.

She twitched her fingers in preparation of her next move.

All around the country she hoped that people would watch as a teenage girl stood above a lethal drop. That they will take in the way her long black hair and baggy casual clothing whipped about in the high winds caused by the two helicopters hovering nearby.

Of course many would immediately dismiss her as some crazy or drug-addled person, she knew that - but as long as _some_ people could be made to believe then she would be content. At least it meant that some people out there might have a chance when the Nightmare Factory began slaughtering their way to world conquest.

"My name," she yelled out, far louder than should have been possible, "Is Yamaguchi Akiko!"

Reaching out in front of her with one hand the girl, Akiko, concentrated for a brief moment. Almost immediately points of light seemed to spark up all around the girl where they hung for a moment before being drawn towards her outstretched hand. There they seemed to join together and mix into a shining mass which stretched itself into a thin shape before suddenly bursting outwards and fading into nothingness. What remained was a short silvery metal staff topped with what looked from a distance like a simple golden egg but up close appeared like a set of golden petals curled protectively around something.

"And I am a magical girl!"

Closing her eyes Akiko threw the staff-holding arm out to one side and, muttering under her breath, slowly swung her arm up and around to scribe a circle in the air with the end of it... As she did so her staff left a shining trail of light purple sparkles that was dense enough to appear as a solid line from a distance. Once the circle was complete the drew back her hand and staff before reaching out again and gently tapping the staff against what had previously been the empty air within the circle.

Only now it wasn't empty air anymore, instead it was a thick mass of purple lines and script packed so tightly together that it seemed like an almost solid wall of color. Pulling back once again the girl spared a moment to wipe at her eyes with her free hand... then viciously stabbed the end of her staff through the center of the circle - it stretched outwards as if made of rubber before the staff pierced through it.

The gold petals opened, a shining jewel revealed from within them that pulsed with light before letting out a bright flash which prompted the purple circle to return to it's original shape - albeit with the staff poking through the middle. Then the wall started moving, hitting the girl only to stretch and deform around her body. Finally it appeared to have stretched too much and it seemed to pop like a bubble.

People watching the news report would gasp at the sight of the girl. They would marvel at how her hair was no longer loose but done up in a tight pigtail that looped around her neck. Her watchers would be amazed at the fact that her clothes, previously a baggy sweater and sweatpants, had vanished only to be replaced with an elaborate purple and black costume that looked like it had come from a child's imagination.

Akiko hoped that this would be enough to make people believe in magic, she didn't really want to try any of her attacks as they tended to be on the... unpleasant side what with having been made to kill and kill and kill some more until she ran out of enemies.

She knew that many would of course laugh and say what an impressive trick it all was and comment on how amazing special effects or sleight of hand have improved over the years.

But... there would be some who wouldn't. Some who believed.

There just _had_ to be!

"Born within the empty night," the girl continued, sniffling slightly, in a voice that was quiet yet somehow still overcame the noise of the helicopters. "To guard until the return of the light, my name is..." the girl's voice hitched as she seemed to suddenly choke up. "m...my name i-is... ma-magical guh-girl..." She froze and shook her head from side to side quickly before looking forward once more. "Magical girl," she yelled out, "Star Reverie!"

The news camera zoomed in then and for the first time people around the country would get good look at the girl's face - and the tears that she knew ran down it.

"I became this when I was eight years old!" She'd been so happy that day, when a tapir named Damarri had told her that she had been blessed with magical powers, that she was the one chosen to protect the world from the Church of Eclipse.

It was rather pathetic that the happiest day of her life had also marked the end of her happiness.

"I have been fighting evil alone every day since then!" She thought about the fights she had gone through, the endless almost daily battles... the injuries she had taken and the many sleepless nights lost to patrolling... the results of that constant fighting, being dropped from school for skipping so many lessons in order to save the world... being accused of delinquency, of drug taking and street fighting because of her constant injuries...

And in the end, being abandoned by her own parents - unable to keep putting up with her ill-deserved reputation and the rumors everyone seemed to be spreading about her.

"And I..." she choked up again, ducking her head and screwing her eyes shut in pain. "I... I'm not strong enough... to keep doing it anymore." she whispered, the magic she had cast right at the start enough to ensure even this quiet speech was clearly heard.

"I've lost everything I ever had, everything I ever cared about... and it's never stopped." fresh tears rolled down her face as she thought about the joy and relief she'd had when the Church had finally fallen. She cried as she remembered the despair that had run through her when the Bloody Carnival had risen to takes it's place with fresh plots and more vicious monsters... and how it had happened all over again when her final victory simply heralded the emergence of the Nightmare Factory.

"It never stopped! Do you hear me!" The girl screamed at the helicopters, "Every day! I thought it was over when I won and it wasn't! They just wouldn't stop! They wouldn't stop and I was all alone for seven years! _Seven! Years!_" She threw her staff around as she screamed, the end of it crackling with energy as her magic reacted to her emotions. "I can't take it anymore! I can't take how much it scares me! I can't take how much it hurts me! I can't take any of it!"

Around the country hundreds upon hundreds of television sets showed a girl simply breaking down on live television.

There were some watching who would dismiss her rantings as crazy talk, some who'd believe it to be a set-up or some kind of theatrical thing, still others who'd simply flip the channel to watch sports or something else - but there would inevitably be a good number who would look on in a mix of horror and sympathy.

But right now the girl had gone past caring about all that.

"I just..." the girl continued, sniffing loudly and calming down as she wiped at her face with one bare arm. "I just want it to _stop_."

She looked up at the helicopters, straight into the cameras of the news crew.

"I... I want..."

She clutched her staff in both hands now, her knuckles visibly tight as they gripped the metal shaft.

"I want someone to save _me_."

The girl edged forward slightly, until her toes were over the edge of the brick ledge.

"Because if there is no-one," she whispered, "If I am truly alone..."

Her arms fell to her sides and her head dropped.

"Then I... I just... I just can't anymore."

One foot was lifted and time seemed to slow down for everyone watching.

"If there is anyone else... then please..."

The foot swung forwards and started to come down as if taking a step into open air.

"... please... save me."

And then, she fell.

**BATTLE FANTASIA**

"Nanoha!" Fate yelled as her friend practically hurtled from the hotel room they had been sharing. Nanoha's family had been treating their daughter to an overnight visit to Tokyo and Lindy, being her current guardian had insisted on paying them to allow Fate to join their trip. Possibly she was fed up of how she and Chrono had been at each other's throats lately, or maybe she just wanted her to see the sights she had never been able to see before - she didn't really know.

What she doubted the Admiral had expected, however, was the live broadcast of a girl - a magical girl - throwing herself off the top of the tallest building in the city.

Nanoha, naturally, had decided she was going to save her but there was really no way for the girl to get there in time with her flight speed.

Fate made a decision.

"Nanoha!" she yelled, rushing out of the room herself, and heading straight towards the stairs leading to the roof of the hotel, stairs her friend was already running up. "I'll go! I'm faster than you! Bardiche!"

"**Barrier Jacket. Sonic Form."**

**BATTLE FANTASIA**

Fate's skin seemed to burn as she started hitting the absolute limits of her high speed flight spell. Normally the spell's friction-reduction field should have prevented that but right now most of the energy it would have been using was instead being used to protect her against high altitude ice and rain. At these kinds of speeds even this ice and water was hitting her like a thousand tiny lances... not a problem for a jet or other flying vehicle but painful and potentially lethal to a much squishier human mage.

Suddenly her path changed, angling almost straight down as she approached the suicidal magical girl from above. An odd angle, but one that was required as Fate knew there was no way to have snatched the girl out of the air without causing massive injury had she been approaching from a perpendicular angle. From a parallel one she would be able to match speeds with the girl, grab her, and then come to a halt.

At first this plan went pretty well. Fate caught up with the falling girl perhaps half-way down the unfinished building and it was not terribly difficult to maneuver close enough for her to wrap her arms around the girl.

That was around the time that she realized she _couldn't_ stop. Not before she and the rescued girl hit the ground at least - they were simply moving far too fast and had far too little distance between them and a rather messy end. Though Fate was pushing almost all of her flight magic into deceleration it was blindingly obvious that this was simply not going to be enough. It didn't help that the girl she caught had begun clinging back and given she was bigger and seemed physically stronger Fate was finding it difficult to properly position herself for casting.

The girl was crying.

Fate could _feel_ the girl crying, even if the speed they were moving at meant she couldn't hear much over the sound of wind whistling past.

The girl was crying and clinging onto Fate as if she were the only life raft in a vast empty ocean... which to that girl she probably was. That girl had admitted such loneliness, admitted such a great wish to simply be _saved._

Like hell was Fate going to let her down.

Stretching one hand, the one holding her Device, towards the oncoming ground the young ace screamed as a trio of golden barriers exploded into existence in front of her. Invisible bands of magic connecting her to the barriers meant that the moment they appeared the two falling girls felt a gut-wrenching shock as the barriers instantly acted like makeshift parachutes. Without the inertial dampening effect of Fate's flight spell the shock would have likely ripped them in two...

Even after that sudden deceleration they were still falling insanely fast but now her barriers were up Fate was sure they would survive the fall.

... It wasn't going to be pleasant though.

In the end it was mostly down to luck that the ground beneath the tower was thankfully clear of people - luck and the fact that Akiko's televised appearance had caused a number of people to move back in the hopes of seeing the top of the tower better.

Everyone else in the way just ran like hell when Fate's magic all but lit up the evening sky. It was a good thing that they did too as those great shields of hers hit the ground like a speeding truck hitting a wall. The first shield exploded as it attempted, and failed, to convert all that kinetic energy into the somewhat safer forms of light, heat and sound. The second fared no better as it too burst upon impact, ripping up the already smashed concrete ground and sending great chunks of debris flying in all directions...

It would have been a massacre had it not been for Bardiche, its thought processes working many times faster than Fate's, throwing up an inverted yellow protection field. A good number of the spectators were highly relieved to find lumps of concrete bouncing off a thin yellow wall which was, in some cases, mere inches away from them. Not that this stopped the screaming, pointing and general panic of the crowd... but at least it meant none died or were injured from the crash landing.

Finally the third of Fate's shields hit the ground and this one, thanks to the masses of energy channeled away by the first two, was able to hold and bleed off the remaining kinetic energy. By the time it finally faded away Fate and her passenger were moving slow enough that the blonde girl was able to come to a safe halt... or at least one that didn't result in serious injury of death.

"Bardiche..." the young girl murmured, her heart pounding like mad, "... well done."

"**Yes, Sir.**" Fate almost laughed slightly at her device's reply - except before she could she heard the rumbling of the crowd around her. People pointing and calling out with questions, congratulations, denials and other things that she simply didn't want to deal with. She knew that when Admiral Lindy heard of all this she was going to be in enough trouble already. Thankfully if there was _one_ thing she had learned from Nanoha's friends it was that when in trouble - say _nothing_ if you didn't want to make things worse.

"Bardiche, Protection."

With an affirmative from her device a new yellow dome sprang up. Unlike the first this was a more traditional use of the spell - as members of the crowd found out when they bumped into it and found the thin field to be harder than steel. Unfortunately the spell didn't protect against the flashing of cameras, nor would it protect against those people holding up cellphones and camcorders in order to record the event.

She did her best to turn away from the cameras and to cover her face with one arm... but the girl clinging to her made that difficult and she half suspected that they'd already taken a good shot of her face already.

Oh but Lindy was going to be _so_ angry at all this... and that would be _before_ one factored in the masses of TSAB regulations she had just broken in the saving of this girl.

She'd be lucky if she got off with life imprisonment!

But as she looked down at the still hysterical girl, who was sobbing and crying like mad in between bouts of mostly incoherent babbling... She found she rather didn't care. Prison or otherwise - she was sure she had done the right thing.

**BATTLE FANTASIA**

There were reporters now. Actual television reporters with cameras and microphones and some snazzy suited person giving a report as they stood a little way outside of Fate's barrier. It seemed as if these reporters were those who had been unable to ride the helicopters from earlier and had been sent to cover the original story from the ground...

Fate wondered for a moment how annoyed those in the helicopters must be now that the _real_ story had turned out to be happening down here instead. Privately she was all but screaming telepathically for Nanoha to just plain _hurry up_. She didn't have the energy to get away with this rescued girl on her own, not after almost burning herself out getting here at speeds faster than she'd ever flown before. It didn't help that what energy she had tried to save for extraction had ended up being put towards making sure they landed in one piece instead.

She was _never_ planning to fly that fast again.

Not until she had practice _stopping_ without blowing great big craters in the ground at least.

A commotion from the crowd pulled her out of her thoughts and, seeing a few people pointing and one of the cameramen aiming upwards, she smiled slightly.

She concentrated for a second, sending a thought up into the skies. "_Nanoha_?" Then she frowned slightly. "_You're late._"

"_Eh? Late? But I was going as fast as I could!_ " Fate almost giggled at the panicked tone of her friend, but she held it back - wary of attracting the reporter's attention again. Then she shook her head and returned to the seriousness of the situation.

"_Nanoha, I caught the girl - she's safe... But I'm stuck; I burned up too much power to risk teleporting with her._ "

"_What about flight?_"

"_She's in too much of a state... I don't think I can keep hold of her on my own if she panics in the air._"

"_I'll be right down!_"

The murmurs of the crowd grew louder as more people pointed up at a pink light that was rapidly - though no-where near as rapidly as Fate - descending from the sky. The blond winced slightly as she saw almost every camera, phone and camcorder rise up to watch as her friend came down. With Nanoha's white barrier jacket and the bright pink wings from her flight spell it was easy to imagine the girl's entrance being a rather striking sight... and one that was sure to get them _both_ in trouble with Lindy when they got back.

"Um, excuse me!" When Nanoha called out to the crowd Fate almost, _almost_, smacked her free hand's palm to her face.

"_What are you doing?_"

"_Ah, being polite?_"

This time Fate did smack her palm against her face.

Above her, still floating above the transparent yellow dome of Fate's protection spell, Nanoha took her time in bowing politely to the assembled crowd. She even went as far as to do this a few times in different directions in order to bow to everyone.

Fate merely tried hard not to groan. The longer both of them, herself and Nanoha, were being filmed the greater the chances that someone would be able to identify them. All it would take would be for someone in Uminari to be watching the news reports at the right time and... Well, that would be that. People would start to _investigate_. Maybe even notice that her background information didn't exactly line up - and neither would that of Lindy, Amy or Chrono.

She was going to be in _such_ trouble when she got home...

"Excuse me!" Nanoha called out from above, apparently oblivious to the distress of her friend below. "Could everyone move back please?"

Surprisingly the crowd, or at least some of it, did. Only a handful of reporters stayed in place as they faced their own cameras and spoke rapidly into the lenses as Nanoha frowned ever so slightly behind them all. Suddenly she was forced backwards in surprise as one of the reporters spun in place and thrust a microphone up in her direction.

"Miss!" The reporter yelled out, "Who are you! What are you! This girl claimed to be a magical girl, are you one too! What do you plan to do with her now you're here! Why have we never seen you or anyone like you before!"

"A-ah.." The young girl backed away, clearly distressed by the deluge of questions now being leveled at her. Fortunately it was but a moment before her worldlier - and angrier - friend came to her aid.

"Will all of you just _shut up_!" The reporters looked down as Fate, who had managed to pull herself to her feet along with the girl she held, roared out at them all. "We're taking this girl to get help - and you're all in the way! So _move_!" She glared at the reporters, then grimaced slightly as she received a mental nudge from Nanoha who, even now, was firmly insistent on being polite. "... _please_!"

Those that were still close to the protection bubble drew back at Fate's angry plea except for one reporter that soon found themselves quite literally dragged backwards by a trio of police officers who had been part of the crowd. A fourth officer, clearly the trio's superior, remained near the bubble and stared at both Fate and the girl she had hanging off her shoulder. After what seemed like several long moments he nodded, then turned and started yelling orders for his men to keep people away and start roping the area off. Behind him Fate sagged slightly and let her spell drop, the yellow bubble quickly fading away into nothingness.

Immediately Nanoha landed and slid around to slip herself under miss Yamaguchi's other arm, hefting the girl's weight as best she could on her shoulders. By now the girl seemed to have calmed down some... though rather worryingly her hysterics appeared to have been replaced with simple shock as she now hung, like a dead weight, between the two smaller magical girls.

Finally, to a chorus of exclamations, yelled questions and a sea of camera flashes, the two girls - with their almost comatose patient - rose into the air.

**BATTLE FANTASIA**

Lights passed by below. White, orange, yellow... and then the giant billboards and illuminated signs the so characterized the big city of Tokyo. To Akiko they looked like some kind of vast sea of multicolored stars that swam in and out of focus.

It was quite possibly the most beautiful sight she had ever seen...

No.

It was the _second_ most beautiful sight she'd ever seen.

The first had been more... red.

They had been a girl's eyes. Eyes that had looked upon her in concern and worry. Eyes that had promised safety and reassurance.

Eyes that belonged to the person who had saved her.

More than that she didn't really know – everything had been a big sort of blur that began from the moment she had stepped off from the edge of the tower. She knew she had been crying, she still was in fact, and she was vaguely aware that she was still mumbling things but... she just couldn't stop. Someone was finally _listening_ to her!

Someone was actually _there_ to listen!

No-one had ever even tried to listen to her before!

Someone... someone had listened and heard her when she had asked for help and... and they had come to save her.

They had come to... to save her.

It... for the past few years something like that had been nothing more than a hope, a tiny dream.

And now... Now it had come true.

**BATTLE FANTASIA**


	2. Chapter 2

_**BATTLE FANTASIA**_

To say that Fate T. Harlaown was in trouble was an understatement. She was in a lot of trouble, so much so that terms to describe how much trouble she was in had yet to be invented. She was in such trouble that she had already given up calculating how long she would be grounded after she realized that the Earth's sun would likely burn itself out before she was a free girl again.

This was assuming she didn't get imprisoned as well. Her limited legal experience meant that she knew the TSAB actually had sentences in place for potentially immortal criminals - life sentences even.

There was a very good chance that what she'd done might rate one.

Did she regret the actions that were going to land her in all this trouble? If she was honest with herself then no, she didn't. There was a girl back on the bed in her room who was alive because of her. Alive because she had just broken every god damn rule in the TSAB handbook - at least the bits she had read so far - in order to snatch her out of the sky some three hundred feet above the ground.

In public.

On camera.

On live camera even, so the TSAB crew aboard the _Athra_ couldn't even perform basic information control as the entire damn country had just seen her grab a self-confessed magical girl out of mid air!

Things had only gone further downhill when Nanoha had caught up with her... and had apologized to the gathering crowd of bystanders – most of which had spent their time taking _photographs_ of the whole scene.

It had helped even less that the helicopters, both police and media, had tried to tail them as they left... and footage of that chase was even now being played on the television Fate was morbidly paying attention to. Thankfully the chase wasn't long as it had been fairly easy to lose both aircraft by dropping into a nearby park, setting up a quick concealing barrier for a while and simply hiding until they had a chance to sneak back to their hotel undetected.

Nanoha's parents, having seen the rescue live on television, had responded in their own way and had soon arranged train tickets to transport all of them back to Uminari... They were forced to take an early morning – or late evening depending on how one looked at it – train in order to avoid the public as best they could.

It had been perhaps an hour or two since they had arrived in Uminari, having caught what little sleep they could on the way. From the train station the two magical girls had flown, Akiko held between them, to Lindy's house while Nanoha's parents made their own way home. Within short order the poor rescued girl had been deposited on Fate's bed with Nanoha looking over her while Fate herself went to rustle up some food of some kind.

Given that the house was empty aside from the three girls it was clear that Lindy, Amy and Chrono were likely up on the _Athra_... where Fate quite frankly hoped they would stay for a while. Though given the mass information scanning capabilities of the TSAB vessel she knew that if they didn't already know about her big rescue by now then they would do soon enough.

This didn't stop her praying that they, Lindy especially, would remain ignorant of the situation for just a _little_ longer.

It was as she was busy rooting around in the refrigerator that Fate heard a familiar cough, one that was less 'I have a problem with my throat' and more 'I wish to have _words_ with you', coming from a little way behind where she stood.

Maybe if she was _really_ lucky that would not be admiral and sort-of adoptive mother Lindy Harlaown standing behind her and instead be someone less likely to imprison or ground her for all eternity...

_**BATTLE FANTASIA**_

"The only thing, the _only_ thing standing between you and a life sentence is the fact that we can just about claim the girl you saved displayed the existence of magic before you did!" Fate ducked her head as Lindy continued the verbal barrage she'd been putting out for the past hour. She had repeated herself, numerous times, contradicted herself occasionally and her voice had risen and lowered more times than an elevator in a busy building. The gist of her speech had been fairly simple: 'you are in the deepest of deep trouble, I'm proud of you for saving her life, I'm going to kill you if you ever pull anything like this again' and, thankfully 'you might not go to prison for life'.

That last point, Fate thought, was really the important bit of the speech.

"Aren't you going to ground her?" Came a male voice from the far side of the room where Chrono had been waiting since showing up part-way through Lindy's tirade. Fate made a mental note to murder him in his sleep or at least do something vengeful - she had been hoping Lindy had forgotten about the possibility of grounding after all.

She was fortunately spared the details of her being grounded until the end of all time by the sound of someone stomping down the stairs. Given that only two people had been upstairs, Akiko and Nanoha, and that one of them wasn't exactly in a condition to be stomping anywhere...

And yet, somehow, it still took everyone by surprise when Nanoha stomped into view. Nanoha didn't _stomp_! Nanoha was always calm and cheerful and Fate could count the number of times she'd seen the brown-haired girl angry on one hand!

Despite this the trio in the kitchen were treated to the sight of Nanoha stomping angrily across the room and towards the front door. It was only when she began opening the door that everyone realized she was in her full barrier jacket and had Raising Heart in shooting mode already.

"Ah... Nanoha?" Lindy called out, a little nervous because while she had nothing to fear from the girl she did rather wish for her home to remain in one piece. "Where are you going?"

The white clad girl paused and looked at the group, seemingly noticing them for the first time. "Ah." she exclaimed, suddenly looking shifty... well shifty for her at any rate. "Um... nowhere?"

Chrono simply raised one eyebrow as he stared at the girl. "Awfully well armed to be going nowhere, aren't you?"

"It's a dangerous neighborhood." Nanoha replied, puffing up in indignation, "Wild... ferrets... and... things... out there."

"While I fully support blowing Yuuno up," the boy countered, "I just can't shake the feeling that you might not be telling the whole truth."

The armed girl squirmed uncomfortably as Chrono glared at her. "It... just a place." she muttered eventually, "Miss Yamaguchi was telling me about it, called the nightmare factory."

"And what were you planning on doing there?" Lindy asked, her own raised eyebrow mimicking that of her son. Fate, behind her, just slapped her palm against her face - she could see where this was going even if Lindy and Chrono couldn't.

"Um..." Nanoha squirmed again and tried to hide Raising Heart behind her back. "I was thinking, um, maybe starting with divine busters and working my way up?" She shifted and fidgeted some more under under the less than impressed gazes of the admiral and her son. "But they deserve it!" The girl burst out eventually having cracked under the pressure already. "Miss Yamaguchi has been fighting them for four years! Before them it was the bloody carnival and before them it was some church of the eclipse! She was telling me all about it between tears!"

"Nanoha..." Lindy muttered, "You are not going to go waging war on some unknown enemy alone." The white-clothed girl frowned at that but a glare from Lindy caused her to hang her head in shame. "Look," the admiral continued, "Why don't you go home for now and we'll sort things out in the morning - okay? I'm going to be getting chewed out as it is already without having to deal with the fallout of any rash actions as well."

The girl just nodded glumly and dispelled her barrier jacket. "Yes ma'am." she mumbled, then looked up at Fate... who was likely the only person in the room to catch the tiny spark of _something_ that flashed in Nanoha's eyes. "I'll see you tomorrow, okay Fate?" she stated before pulling the door open and leaving.

The distraction dealt with, Lindy turned back to Fate and resumed her spiel - this time remembering to ground the blond girl until all life ended. Fate, for her part, simply listened patiently and nodded or shook her head at the appropriate moments in the dressing down. By the end of the 'talk' she was simply standing with a slight smile on her face - a smile which suddenly struck Lindy as being very suspicious indeed.

"Fate..." The woman murmured, a vague sensation of foreboding starting to develop. "What are you hiding?"

The blond girl smiled. "I was just thinking," she said, "that by now Nanoha has probably found that nightmare factory place and is busy wrecking it with Vita or Signum - maybe even both. You did say she couldn't do it alone after all."

There was silence as all the blood drained from Lindy's face in one go.

"Oh." She muttered weakly. "Oh dear."

_**BATTLE FANTASIA**_

When Nanoha had shown up at the door to Hayate's place, panting with the exertion of a high speed flight, Vita had known that something big was going down. She had seen the news report - not live as Hayate and Zafira had but a re-broadcasting of the event an hour or so later. At first she, like Signum and Shamal, had not really understood why their master was so insistent on making them sit down to watch the news broadcast. Usually only Shamal had any interest in such and it was pretty rare for Hayate to watch anything other than cartoons, so they had no clue as to what the girl had wanted them to see.

When that girl had stepped off the building...

Vita was able to see where she was coming from and she was pretty sure the rest of the knights did as well - life after life of theirs had been dedicated to an almost perpetual cycle of fighting and murdering and losing... until Hayate had come along and changed everything.

The knights had known that for that girl there had been no Hayate.

At least not until Fate had caught her.

Which was why when Nanoha showed up at their door fully armed and asking for their master the knights had left the two alone and quietly gone to talk amongst themselves.

Minutes later Hayate had called them back. Vita knew that the event had struck her hard as it had been on more than one occasion that she and the other knights had comforted their master when her fears over her paralysis had gotten on top of her. No doubt she was imagining what it would have been like had she not had those four friendly shoulders to cry on and support her - even someone as brave as Hayate could have had terrible thoughts in such a situation.

"Nanoha..." the wheelchair-bound girl began, "Nanoha has told me about the girl Fate saved." The Wolkenritter all perked up at that, an instinct in the back of their minds telling them that they would be seeing battle tonight. "I... We... About her enemies... that is to say..." Hayate seemed to struggle with what she wanted to say.

"Our Master," Signum had stated, surprising the young girl with her overly formal tone. "We know what you want to do and we cannot find it in ourselves to disagree - so please, will you command us?"

Hayate looked at her knights in surprise for a moment before a resolved look crossed her face and the knights caught the first glimpse of a woman who would someday lead them as their commander, their master and their queen.

"My knights," she murmured quietly, "Out there a girl has spent many years of her life in hell, a hell that could have been avoided if only she had not been alone." The brown-haired girl looked at her knights, her eyes bright with anger. "Find those responsible." she declared. "Find them... and show them that we will not let anyone fight alone anymore." Behind her Nanoha nodded in agreement, then hopped back in surprise as all four knights dropped to one knee simultaneously and practically roared their acceptance of the task their master, their friend, had given them.

_**BATTLE FANTASIA**_

Yuuki Yamaguchi had always worked hard. Worked hard to be an asset at his office, worked hard to be a good husband, worked hard to please his family and worked hard to honor and please his parents, especially his father. The man, rest his soul, was always distant and encouraged personal discipline, honor and tradition. He even married through a matchmaker (however, Yuuki strongly suspected that his mother made backdoor arrangements to get his childhood friend and crush, Aki, to be matched with him). Even after he passed, Yuuki would sometimes catch himself imagining his father's spirit watching him, his dispassionate eyes boring into him.

It was during such a moment when Aki and himself had considered what to do with The Girl. For years she allowed her grades to slip, and it was obvious that she was getting into the start of a harsh life. Scrapes and bruises that she would refuse to explain. Disappearing into the night and returning who knew when. She was reserved at first, looking suitably ashamed whenever her mother and he scolded her. But as she grew into a lovely young woman, the very image of his wife at that age, she started to speak up, then talk back. Finally full blown fights started, and Yuuki started to worry about his blood pressure. And then the police started visiting, asking odd questions about The Girl's activities.

Then, two years ago, he'd sat down with Aki one night after they heard The Girl leave; the topic being on what to do with her, this girl who by all evidence was somehow turning into some sort of delinquent. For weeks they had each prepared both mentally and emotionally for this discussion, gathering information and pamphlets about places and facilities that dealt with such problem children in a dignified, and most importantly _quiet_ manner. They looked over the materials for what felt like hours, seeing where would be the best place to send The Girl.

Finally they settled on one place. It had a strong reputation, and boasted the dubious honors of housing the more horrifying of degenerate juveniles. Aki had looked him in the eyes, waiting for his say-so to send The Girl away. For a moment, he hesitated, and he could not imagine why.

Actually, that was a lie. He knew why. Even after five years of The Girl's descent into delinquency, Yuuki Yamaguchi refused, on a fundamental level, to believe his little girl, who always insisted on sharing her after-school snack when he came home from work, who had the laugh of a little bell, who always loved it when Daddy came into her room and told her bedtime stories of youkai and samurai and princesses, could become some sort of criminal scum.

For a moment he hesitated in making the proper, _Honorable_ decision, and came within inches of tearing the brochure in two and burning it. And it was in that moment he could swear he felt his father's eyes from beyond the grave, drilling into the back of his skull in disapproval. And so, Yuuki Yamaguchi decided, for the sake of their family's Honor, to send The Girl away, to be out of sight and mind, never to be mentioned again.

And he hated himself for it, though no one would know it. One thing he _had_ picked up from his father was the man's poker face. But even his stone-still face could not stand up against the voice of his mother over the phone. If there was ever a true Yamato Nadeshiko, an outwardly submissive and demure woman hiding a steel will, it was his mother, who never thought The Girl was what he and his wife had feared she had become.

'Why couldn't you have sent little Akiko to me?' she had said on the phone when he told her. 'You know she was always happy here.'

And it was true. As the years went on, it seemed that The Girl, Akiko, became more and more ecstatic at the news that she was visiting her grandmother in the mountains, even as she oddly became more and more conflicted about leaving their neighborhood for even a weekend.

But the situation was bigger than that. The family's honor was at stake, and Yuuki had to look after it, just like his father had done, and he told his mother so. She just sighed at that and changed the subject.

Yuuki knew that his father would be proud of him for his course of action. Honor was more important than mere emotional attachments.

Then why was it that he felt so awful at what he had done? Why was he haunted by The Girl's look in her eyes as he and his wife left her at that place? Why was he secretly elated when he got the call that she escaped later that year? Why did he wait expectantly for six months for her to come to their door, or for a call from mother saying The Girl was staying with her? Why did he spend more and more time with his co-workers at the bar, and less and less with his wife at home?

Like today for instance. He and his friends from work and a few of their more important clients would always come to this particular bar a few blocks down the street from their office building after work, talking shop and sharing a few laughs before calling it a night, and tonight the crowd as a little bigger than usual. Their boss, Mr. Kurosawa, let everyone off an hour early today to celebrate his secretary getting engaged.

Yuuki Yamaguchi sat at his usual stool, with old friend Ryo to his right and Mr. Kurosawa himself sitting on his left, the din of the crowd drowning out his secret regrets a little, the alcohol doing the rest, but for some reason, the news anchor announcing a jumper at the Tokyo Sky Tree cut through to conversations straight to his ear. But while a few turned to watch with morbid curiosity, Yuuki just focused on his shot of Jack Daniels, praying that it would drown out the sorrows of the world.

And then Ryo tapped his shoulder.

"Hey Yuuki, isn't that your little girl?"

If Yuuki were a swearing man he probably would have, the fact that his boss was right there being irrelevant. Ryo knew how sensitive the situation with The Girl was, and how he would prefer to keep it quiet. Damn Osakan bumpkins.

"Oh? Yuuki has a daughter?"

Yuuki winced at the sound of Mr. Kurosawa's voice.

"It umm… I'd rather not talk about it sir." He said, knowing the next question he would ask, and finding himself unable to lie to his face in light of the man's insistence on honesty. It was even on his door: 'An Honest Businessman, is an Honorable Businessman.'

Mr. Kurosawa nodded at that and turned around to the TV.

"_My name is Yamaguchi Akiko! And I am a magical girl!"_ That caught even Yuuki's attention, his head turning to the screen.

She looked just like her mother at that age. Or she would have, were it not for the hair being cut too short, and the teary, emotionless eyes and dull voice. Oh, and the lights shooting around her and the clothes transforming into something out of a manga.

The next minute and a half had The Gi-… _Akiko_, lamenting her life to the world, a life full of impossible things like magic and monsters and the sort of horrors that should only exist in nightmares, and begging, _begging_ for the possibility that there were others like her out there to come and save her.

And all the while Yuuki Yamaguchi, her father, watched with baited breath, a growing sense of horror and guilt forming in his stomach. Suddenly everything began to make sense, impossible as it was. Akiko was no delinquent, she was a warrior like those of old, fighting an evil that only she could see.

And he had cast her out in her hour of greatest need.

Then she jumped. Somewhere in the distance was the sound of glass breaking, and Yuuki suspected that it was his shot glass hitting the floor.

His only child, falling forever through time and space, racing for the cold hard cement below, and he was going to watch it happen.

Or he would have, when a streak of black intercepted the dot that was his daughter, and circles of sunlight caught her, slowing her down before she struck the sidewalk, dust and debris flying into the air.

Ragged breath returned to Yuuki, not realizing that he was holding it, his skin, he realized, was oddly cold, and suddenly the peripheral vision that he didn't notice was gone had returned. It was then that he saw Mr. Kurosawa looking up at him in the eye, and felt the older man's hands clenching his biceps, and heard his voice talking to him over the returned din of the crowd.

"Yuuki... Yuuki my boy, listen to me." He said, gently directing the man to lean forward as he put his mouth to his ear. "I think it would be best if you went home to your wife, and stayed there for a while, Mr. Yamaguchi."

Before Yuuki could say anything his boss raised a hand for silence.

"Now don't get the wrong idea, this is _not_ a dismissal. I fully expect you to be at your desk at nine AM sharp come Monday morning. Now, I won't pry into your personal business, and I am more than willing to listen should you feel the need to confide in someone, but I can see that this should qualify as a family emergency, and you have more than enough vacation time built up. Now go, you need to be with your wife, both for her sake and your own. Now go."

A hand patted his shoulder, and Yuuki turned to see Ryo looking at him intently, nodding his head to the door without a word.

Turning back to Mr. Kurosawa, Yuuki bowed, and may have mumbled a thanks, he couldn't tell, and then turned around and made his way out the door

The next thing the man knew he was making his way down the stairs to the subway, the same station he always used to board the train home. This time his cell phone was in his hand, punching in the number for home.

No one answered the phone, and so on the forth ring he got his own voice on the answering machine.

"Aki, it's me." He said, his voice oddly thick. "I guess you saw the news jus-"

He was interrupted by the sound of the phone being picked up with obviously nervous and shaking hands.

"_Yuuki?"_ From the sound of it she had been crying, and trying to hide it.

"Hello my Sakura Blossom." He said impulsively. Which was odd, when was the last time he called her by his pet name for her? Certainly since before things started falling apart.

He wanted to say so many things as he entered the train, not caring about the dozens of people around him. He wanted to joke about how his mother would laugh at them, saying a chorus of 'I told you so's, of how he knew she didn't want to send Akiko away anymore than he did, and how he loved her for her strength. Of how he loathed himself at what had just now become apparent. But even now he couldn't quite shake his father's stoic standards.

And so, after a moment's pause and a shaky breath, he said what he could.

"It would seem that we… _I..._ was wrong. We did not raise a delinquent, but a _True_ Ronin."

_**BATTLE FANTASIA**_

"So This is the place huh?" As she looked up at the black walls of what, up until a few moments ago, had been an ordinary factory-like building the iron knight Vita was forced to admit that it did look kind of cool in a sort of horrific den of evil way. She'd never really come across anything like this before during her service to the book of darkness and she was actually feeling rather excited at, well, at slaying monsters. The kind of work a _real_ knight was supposed to do - the kind of work she couldn't remember having ever done herself. The fact that Hayate had commanded her to take part in this most noble of tasks only served to make her bounce lightly with barely restrained energy.

This... was a quest.

An honest-to-god actual real _quest_ - against evil even!

Even the normally stoic Signum seemed to have gained an unmistakable air of energy about her, Shamal had been practically glowing with power since Hayate's speech and Zafira had slipped into a state of almost perfect focus. Given how Nanoha was treating the four knights as if they were unexploded bombs it was obvious even she could feel the excitement, energy, power and focus that the knights were currently filled with.

"How are we going to get in?" Shamal asked as she went through the motions of setting up an array of barrier and capturing spells to contain the structure. She had told Nanoha it was to prevent innocents getting caught in the fight... but the other knights knew that it was really to ensure that there would be no escape for their opponents.

"I think we should knock." came the suggestion of Zafira as he stood near Shamal and performed his own searching spells to assist the blond woman.

Nanoha looked at the wolf-man with some confusion. "Knock?"

"**Explosion! Raketenform!**" The white devil spun around at the voice of Graf Eisen, only to squawk in surprise as the front wall of the factory exploded under the less than gentle touch of the iron count.

"Oh. Like that." Nanoha smiled, "I can do that."

"**Shooting Mode! Cartridge Load!**"

"Divine..."

_**BATTLE FANTASIA**_


	3. Chapter 3

Chrono realized that leaving Fate to get yelled at was, perhaps, not entirely loyal. 

Then again, interfering in one of 'Admiral Mom's dressing downs was not on his list of things to do. 

Ever. 

Listening now... 

It might have been fun if it were Nanoha. Nanoha would get indignant. Listening to Fate try to puzzle out the earnest listing of the reasons why what she did was strictly against regulations and wrong, but also something Lindy was very proud of her for and having her be further embarrassed by knowing you were watching was just a little too much like kicking a kitten. 

Even if his new 'little sister' did have a _slight_ penchant for treating regulations as something closer to suggestions than rules. 

Sisterly abandonment to the side, he'd left rather than face round three of Fate vs. the law in order to find someone else embroiled in highly technical struggle. 

He found her right where he expected her to be, too: hunched forward in her chair in front of the data screens that networked all of the TSAB's sensor systems currently on planet into her control and scowling. 

Amy didn't so much as twitch as he put a hand on the back of her chair, shuffling through scanning maps and scrolling sensor readings almost on autopilot. 

"Find anything?" He asked innocently and got a subvocallized growl in reply. 

"No. Dammit. It. Is. So. Annoying." Amy snarled and then pounded one hand on the desk hard. "I _know_ finding mages who don't want to be found is hard. When we were looking for the Knights, unless they were set up, and even half the time when they were, even though I knew what to look for, I didn't find anything. Even though they don't even live very far from here. I know, the book was a lost logia - but it hasn't gotten a lot better either." 

Amy heaved in a deep breath and then let it out again slowly. "It still pisses me off - even though I have the address, I still can't detect this 'Nightmare factory' at all." 

Chrono blinked then turned slowly to look at her. "Nothing?" 

"Nothing. If we didn't have Akiko-chan's directions and GPS I probably couldn't even find the place." Amy sighed. "I know this planet isn't well scanned. The Bureau's been here a handful of times - heck, the Jewel Seeds incident gave us better scans of this world than we've ever had and made us estimate it's magical population up an order of magnitude at least - but even then we never got anything solid. Except jewel seeds and Fate." 

"That girl was fighting a war under my nose as early as last week and I didn't know - it's enough to give me nightmares, factory not necessary." Amy concluded. 

"Nothing solid. What about what isn't solid?" Chrono asked musingly. 

Amy shrugged and hit a few keys bringing up a map absolutely covered with splotches of color. 

"Stuff I can't confirm? Our sensors and interpretation software are so good in some ways, it's a disadvantage. I can probably pull a ghostly magical girl out of a bowl of Jello if I want to." Amy grumbled. "If I go by this map, earth has a bigger mage population than Midchida. But if I go by that Midchida has more mages on it than people. Most worlds wind up looking like that if you turn the interpretation software up too high." 

"And the sensors don't get solid readings because...?" 

"We both know making sure readings aren't solid is unfortunately one of the easiest things to do with concealment magic." Amy sighed. "And if 'keep your magic under cover' makes it into the local social background noise thoroughly enough that even the bad guys pick up on it -" 

"Then some of the people could almost hold a pitched battle and we wouldn't know." 

Amy nodded glumly. "Add the mess the girls and the Arc-En-Ciel made of local dimensional space recently - a lot of them could. Don't throw around more power than, say, A-rank spells for more than a few seconds at a time and a good enough disguise magic would have me chasing phantom signals for weeks. And all of this assumes we know what we're looking for. And we don't." 

"What?" Chrono asked startled, and Amy gave him a serious look. 

"Akiko's magic style is not in the TSAB database. At all. The things she was fighting aren't either - and they don't even use the same structure as she does." She said firmly. "I could watch for them with all eyes for a week and if she hadn't shown me what she looks like by being in my elegant analysts hands - I'd never find them if they didn't out and out advertise. The best I can say is that there are more mages hiding on earth - there have been enough ghost impressions that some of them have to be real. Which ones, where they actually are rather than where I detected them.." 

"...you don't know." 

"I'm actually more likely to get it _wrong_ than right with most of these readings." Amy sighed - then made a soft sounds as Chrono reached across her chair and started massaging her back. 

"Thanks." She sighed. "I've been at it all day, but unless I have a breakthrough.." 

"We do the best we can." Chrono told her calmly. "It's all we can do."

_**BATTLE FANTASIA**_

Graf Eisen swung in a lazy arc as it crashed through a bunch of the little black and red critters that infested the Nightmare Factory. Vita didn't really know what the things were and frankly she didn't care as none of them really put up a fight of any kind, instead they simply exploded into clouds of black smoke when hit hard enough. Maybe if they were fighting someone weaker than her then they'd be a challenge but for the most part it seemed like even a one-hundred per-cent normal human could have ripped their way through a crowd of the things.

How boring.

She had expected a fight worth crowing about! A toe-to-toe brawl with monsters beyond imagining against which she could go all out against! Not a horde of worthless nothings!

She frowned. Had Signum been this way? After she had split from the other two she had sort of lost track of where things were - she was beginning to suspect the factory was actively changing it's layout to distract her. Maybe the reason she was batting away underlings was because their bosses had already been defeated or were busy fighting one of the others? That sounded an awful lot like she was being treated as if she wasn't a threat - and that pissed her off! Spotting a nearly door the red-clad knight didn't even think twice about kicking the thing down and rushing in with Graf Ei...sen...

Vita paused.

First she looked back over her shoulder.

Then she once again took in the sight around her.

The reason for her sudden wariness was that she had just walked into what she clearly recognized as Hayate's room. The broken door behind her opened out onto what the rest of the factory had looked like - sickly green walls covered in dripping pipes and rusty grilles - but the room she was in now looked exactly as if it were Hayate's room back home.

"_heLLo vITa._"

The knight shuddered at the high-pitched voice. She knew that voice, it was a voice that she had spent weeks trying to forget after the first time she had heard it. A squeaky, burbling voice that someone, somewhere had mistakenly thought was the ideal thing to comfort children with... It was the voice of 'Speak Easy Deadbunny' - a speaking version of her favorite plush toy. Apparently thanks to a manufacturing error almost all the first batch of the things had spoken with horrific voices which had terrified thousands of young deadbunny fans across the country - her included. That voice had haunted her nightmares for _weeks_.

Her pulse rising rapidly, Vita scanned the room for the source of the voice. On the dresser? The windowsill? Maybe hidden in the wardrobe? Reflexively she glanced towards the door for an escape route... only to see nothing but a blank wall where there had once been a door.

"_vITa, vITa, vITa, wHEre ARe yOU loOKinG?_" The red-haired girl let out a slight whimper as she turned around to face Hayate's bed and the large lump under the covers that hadn't been there the first time she had looked. She knew what was happening - this whole setup was following a reoccurring nightmare she had experienced for a long while a month or two after she had first met Hayate.

Dimly she realized why this place was called the Nightmare Factory.

Shaking her head Vita gripped Graf Eisen harder, hard enough that her hands hurt. She knew this was a nightmare... but in her nightmares she had never been _armed_. A nasty grin spread across her face as the idea of beautiful, beautiful revenge crossed her mind. "Eisen!" she hissed, pulling the iron count back for a full overhead swing and leaping forward.

The head of the mallet smashed into Hayate's bed... and the scream that came from what was under the covers was most definitely _not_ the high pitched one Vita had expected. In fact it had sounded horrifyingly like... like...

"Hayate!" the red-haired girl screamed, almost dropping Graf Eisen in shock as a large part of her brain kicked in with the seemingly absolute certainty that she had just killed her own mistress, best friend and family member. That wasn't true! It couldn't be true! Hayate was safe at home where she and the other knights had left her!

But as the bed covers started to stain themselves red around the point of impact Vita found that her rational thought was pushed to one side as she dived at the bed and scrabbled wildly at the material. Eventually her fingers gained purchase on the cloth and she ripped it away -

"_Boo._"

- only to reveal the large off-white head of deadbunny, it's red eyes looking right at her and it's stitched mouth curled up in a nasty smirk.

"_eXPecTIng SOmeONe eLSe... vITa?_"

The knight screamed and jumped away as the large version of her favorite plush toy sat up in the bed and twisted it's head to look at her. Then it seemed to twitch and look down at the hole in it's chest, damage from when Graf Eisen had smashed into it on the bed.

"yOU hiT HarD."

The plush rabbit sagged forward, then moved to push itself off of the bed.

"_Did YOu tHInk I Was SOmeONe sPEciAL?_"

Vita backed away, her head shaking from side to side in denial. She was stronger than this! She should have been able to just smash her way through this thing but... but it was hard to make her body do what she wanted it to do. Her legs felt so weak and her arms were shaking almost so much that it was hard to keep hold of her weapon properly. Her breathing was shallow and her heart rate had rocketed - her body was reacting in fear whether she wanted it to or not.

"_I WonDEr iF I caN See IF thEY scREam AS weLL as YOu dO?_"

The wolkenritter froze.

"What... did you say?" She ground out between clenched teeth, her trembling seeming to slow and one hand reaching down to a pouch at her waist.

"_HayATe iS It? tHE naME reSOunDS in YOur NighTMarES._"

The iron knight's shaking stopped dead.

"_yoUR imAGinATioN Of hER scREam SOunDEd sO VerY TasTY._"

"You..." she hissed as she extracted a trio of iron balls from the pouch at her waist "...Stay the hell..." In one movement she threw the balls into the air and swung her mallet around in a great arc. "...Away from Hayate!"

"_**Schwalbe Fliegen!"**_ The hammer smashed into the balls and launched them like a trio of angry hornets at the giant plush toy where they crashed into it - doubling the monster over with the impact even as they blew their way out through it's back.

"Now," Vita whispered as she approached the collapsed plush toy, Graf Eisen transforming into it's rocket form as she did so. "I don't think you scare me anymore." She grinned nastily as her device loaded not one but two cartridges in a row. It's head glowing with the massively dense magical energies the iron count was drawn back by it's owner.

When it came to threats against their master's life, little emotions like 'fear' were rendered meaningless to one of the Wolkenritter.

To one of their enemies, now cowering upon the ground, 'fear' was a very, very real thing.

_**BATTLE FANTASIA**_

Signum stared around the dark room she had found herself in and tried to ignore the headache that straining her eyes to see was giving her. In contrast to the grimy industrial brick and metal hallways she had been exploring before, this room was clean and clad entirely in polished wood. Dominating one wall was a pair of deep red curtains of a kind she vaguely knew to usually close off a stage from an audience.

Given there was a single chair in the middle of the room, facing the stage, she guessed that she was supposed to be the audience. If this room was a trap of some kind, and she was smart enough to know it was, then just by walking in she had likely set it off - which left two options open to her: Defeat the trap or simply escape it.

She didn't even have to look to know that the entrance to the room had either closed or vanished, as what kind of trap would this have been if she could have simply walked away? For a moment the knight considered breaking one of the walls but she soon dismissed the idea since she had no idea what was on the other side or even if they were breakable at all. While she could easily smash though wood paneling the rest of the factory had been made of heavy brickwork and she suspected that such material lay behind the polished wood. She'd tried to break through such a brick wall earlier and while she had succeeded it had taken far too long, implying heavily that the walls were magically protected against such damage.

Besides, she was mildly curious as to how this 'Nightmare Factory' organization fought. If she was to assist in taking down the entire group then she needed to gain some insight into the fighting styles of it's warriors... as opposed to those annoying black and red creatures that swarmed all over the place.

The sound of rustling cloth made her turn to look at the stage, where the two curtains were slowly pulling apart to reveal part of a stage. A few moments later a spotlight seemed to turn on to illuminate the stage from above - and then a man walked out.

He was a young man, twenty years old or so. He was a pretty forgettable seeming person really and the only thing of note was that he was wearing an older style TSAB naval uniform.

Signum was about to call out to him when he spoke, his voice echoing loudly around the room.

"My name... is gunnery officer Mark Zandasson." He stared straight ahead, seemingly fixated upon the far wall of the room. "I worked aboard the TSAB vessel 'Caiman'. My life was worth seven pages."

And then he died.

The swordswoman was pretty damn sure he died given that he had done so by having his chest suddenly explode in a cloud of blood, a great ragged gash simply appearing upon it without any warning or reason for doing so. She immediately ran over to the falling body, her senses on high alert for what may have been some kind of invisible enemy, but as she approached the body simply vanished - the blood and gore fading away with it.

She was just coming to terms with that when someone else walked onto the stage, an older woman this time. Like the man before her she wore an older-style TSAB navy uniform only hers had the markings of support staff across her breast. Just like the man she walked to the center of the stage before staring out over the audience room - completely ignoring Signum's attempts to communicate.

"My name," she stated, "is private Liza Codonelli. I worked aboard the TSAB vessel 'Caiman'." Signum frowned at the name, hearing it twice made her realize that it sounded vaguely familiar. "My life was worth three pages."

Having said that she too died, though unlike the man before she seemed to slide in half as the top part of her body simply fell away from the bottom. Before Signum even had a chance to react to that a third person, another man, stepped out. This one had the barrier jacket of a mage and his appearance made her hiss in horror as she recognized the man's face from one of the photographs dotted around Lindy's home.

It was the face of a man who had supposedly died during the previous Book of Darkness incident - the one before the last.

"My name," he boomed out, "is commander Vern Simons. I worked aboard the TSAB vessel 'Caiman'." The knight watching him winced as she realized what he was about to say next - and the connection the three people had.

"My life was worth sixteen pages." The man stated, before slumping over thanks to a great stab wound appearing in his abdomen.

A stab wound that Signum identified easily as the kind that Laevatein was capable of making.

Although she didn't remember any of these three people it was rapidly becoming clear that they must have all been killed by her around the same time. Even as the knight realized this a fourth person stepped out, declared their name and what they were doing then keeled over dead after stating what Signum now knew to be the number of pages the Book of Darkness had obtained from them.

Two more people appeared and repeated the same performance as the swordswoman searched around for an exit, or some kind of enemy. Although she had to admit that having people appear to show how and say why she'd killed them was... disconcerting... it didn't seem particularly worthy of being the entire content of a trap.

A hundred people later with still no sign of any way out, Signum was forced to change her mind on that view - it was kind of like a morbid form of water torture, a constant unending stream of people she had apparently murdered while under the guide of the Book of Darkness.

Two hundred later and she had given up on trying to escape as there was no physical exits to be found and the protections on the walls had rendered them seemingly unbreakable with her weapon. Resolutely she had decided to wait as eventually the being behind this would show themselves - and then she would show them just how little she appreciated the performance.

At three hundred she had already lost her composure once and begun yelling threats and epithets at whatever was behind this.

By the time the count reached past half a thousand she simply wanted it all to stop.

_**BATTLE FANTASIA**_

Nanoha slowed her flight before coming to a halt as she once again tried to get her bearings. She'd been keeping a mental map of her explorations and it was beginning to dawn on her that the effort she'd spent doing so had been a complete waste. The halls and rooms of the factory seemed to be constantly changing position in what was likely a passive defense against intruders.

Coming to a halt in one smaller room, little more than a terminal for several passages to meet, Nanoha considered her options. Just flying around had been rather unproductive and the longer she remained lost the more she worried that whatever they were after was going to get away. Sure Shamal and Zafira were outside waiting but even she had to admit that the two of them couldn't cover every escape route on their own.

"Maybe I should just blow a hole in the wall?" She murmured, part to herself and part to her device. "I _think_ this way is towards the middle of the factory..." The girl paused, then turned to her right, "or is it this way?"

"Does it really matter?" A voice spoke out from behind her. "Wouldn't it be simpler to just level everything? A starlight breaker would do it nicely wouldn't you say?" There was a short laugh, "Nyahaha, of course you would - I should know right?"

Nanoha spun to face the speaker, swinging Raising Heart down into her classic shooting position as she did so... only for her to almost drop the device as her hands went momentarily numb, along with the rest of her, in shock at who the speaker was.

"Ooh," whistled the speaker - an almost identical copy of the young ace. "You should be more careful with that." This new Nanoha, as far as the original could see, was about as perfect a copy as anyone could have hoped to produce. Everything from the hairstyle to the face to the outfit was exactly what the the first Nanoha saw whenever she looked in a mirror. She even held her own copy of Raising Heart, though unlike the original she was twirling the staff idly in one hand as if she were bored.

"Y-You-!" Nanoha stammered, clutching her device in one hand and pointing wildly with the other. "Who are you!"

"Isn't it obvious who I am? I'm you!" The other replied before grinning and grabbing her device in both hands. "Now back to my suggestion of you just leveling everything..."

"You can't do that!" The first yelled, then frowned, "I mean, _I_ can't do that! Vita and Signum are still here! And who do you think you are, claiming to be me?"

The duplicate cocked her head to one side, an expression of confusion flashing across her face. "Why not?" She asked, "We've blown them up before." Then she frowned slightly, "and it's not like they don't deserve it. They've been downright _unfriendly_ lately."

"Wh- How could you say that!" Though Nanoha was horrified by her duplicate's statement she was even more horrified to find that there was a part of her agreeing that yes, the Wolkenritter had been less friendly than usual recently.

"You mean how could _we_ say that. I'm you in every way after all - a direct reflection of everything you are..." The doppelganger replied before shrugging, "Which is why you really should already know how I could suggest it. After all the only difference between us is that I won't deny things like that the way you do."

The original of the two girls frowned. "I don't shoot my friends." she stated after a few moments.

There was a moment of silence before the copy doubled over in laughter, an act which looked particularly odd given that she was doing so in mid-air. "Oh wow!" she exclaimed in between laughs, "I can't believe you actually believe that!" Soon the laughter died down and the girl was left wiping her eyes free of laughter induced tears. "We're so heavily in denial aren't we?" She asked, then nodded to her opposite, "well you are at least."

"Wh-what! I am not!" Nanoha yelled back, rather put off by the other girl's overblown reaction to her earlier statement. "Why would I ever want to shoot them?"

The other Nanoha fell silent and looked at the first curiously, as if she didn't believe that she had just been asked such a question. "You'll even deny that?" She murmured, "You're worse off than I thought you were. Do you even deny knowing what a friend is?"

The first girl frowned slightly, "A friend?" she asked, "A friend is someone who can understand you."

"Someone who can understand your pain." The double whispered, "Someone who won't leave you, won't abandon you and won't make you feel as if the world wouldn't mind if you didn't exist." The false Nanoha floated around the real one, throwing in an artistic twirl now and then as she did so.

"Poor us," she all but sang, "Left all alone by our family, back when we first realized we weren't important to them at all. Imagine leaving a child as young as us alone like that - we always did wonder what they were thinking then."

"They had good reasons!" Nanoha yelled, twisting in the air to track the other girl. "Papa was sick and the bakery needed all the help it could get!"

"So what!" The double exclaimed, stopping and then leaning forwards until her face was inches from the other Nanoha's. "They could have taken us with them to the bakery! They could have asked a friend to look after us! They could have done a hundred things but they didn't! They didn't care enough to do anything more than just _leave_ us behind all day!"

"That's..." The original trailed off, unable to admit the other girl was right but finding it hard to claim she was wrong either. She remembered those days, not perfectly, but she remembered the sensation of being all alone in their home, of being a small child who couldn't understand why her mommy was never around like everyone else's were. She remembered the meals which were rushed and sparse... and she remembered the mommy who always promised to tuck her in at night but always forgot because she was too exhausted to remember.

But mostly she remembered the little girl she had been, the little girl who didn't understand the reasons why mommy was always too busy and daddy was always asleep at the white building, why big brother was never around and why big sister never had time for her...

"And that was when we decided we needed friends." her copy hissed, "Friends who wouldn't leave us, friends who wouldn't abandon us." She grinned, "Friends like Arisa and Suzuka! When we first saw them at school, always together, never apart... what did we think?"

"I want that." Came the soft, almost silent, reply from the real Nanoha.

Her doppelganger nodded knowingly. "That's right. The little baker's daughter, wanting to be friends with the millionaire children... but they would never be friends with us normally would they?" The duplicate swung around behind Nanoha, wrapping one arm around her shoulders and leaning close to whisper in her ear. "So we fixed that, we beat Arisa until she belonged to us and we made sure Suzuka was afraid we'd do the same to her if she wasn't our friend."

"Th-that's not..." Nanoha protested, though her tone was both weak and hesitant.

"Not what happened?" The double asked, "After a little denial, a little editing of events? Of course it wouldn't be - we always claimed to be saving Suzuka from a bully, right?" She grinned nastily and released Nanoha in order to spin around to be in front of the girl. "But I don't deny things, I know who was the real bully there and I know that we _liked_ it that way. We liked having power, we liked seeing Arisa flinch every time she believed we thought she was acting _unfriendly_, it meant she was too afraid to abandon us... Though she soon grew out of that - I wonder if it was because she honestly started thinking of herself as our friend?"

The false Nanoha frowned as a thought occurred to her. "Or maybe she realized how little power we actually had over her? She was rich after all - she could have easily stopped us if she wanted. It couldn't have been hard to get us thrown out of school with the kind of resources her family could throw around." She scowled for a moment longer before relaxing and giving an indifferent shrug, "Well no matter, she can have all the resources she wants - we have _magic_ now!" From there the girl twirled once and spread her arms wide, her face covered with a bright grin that bordered on the sadistic. "With magic we can get all sorts of new friends _and_ make sure the ones we have have no chance to abandon us!"

"No!" The real Nanoha yelled out, causing the fake to flinch back in surprise. "My magic isn't for that! My magic is... it's for..." She trailed off, unsure of herself. "It's..."

"You can't even come up with a good reason for it, can you?" The double leaned forwards, one hand on her hip and the other stretching out to waggle a finger in Nanoha's face. "We use our magic just like we used our fists, as a means to take advantage of everyone around us." She laughed lightly, "Our magic was just a gift! The greatest gift anyone, _anyone_, had ever given us!"

"Yuuno gave it to us." Nanoha murmured, frowning slightly as a thought came to mind. "We..." she shook her head to clear it before continuing. "_I_ never needed to hurt him!" Her voice rose to a yell as she latched onto an argument that countered the fake's claims about her friendships. "Yuuno is my friend - and I didn't hurt him at all!"

The other Nanoha stared at the original for a few long seconds. "And where is he now?" She asked, her voice whisper quiet. "Well?"

"He..." The ace backed away from her copy as she realized exactly where she was going with her question. "He's... he's just busy!" she called out, though it sounded like she was speaking more to herself than to her double. "He's got an... an important... He has a job and... and..."

"The same excuses our family used!" The double roared, "They're busy! They're sick! They're tired! They'll come back to you later! Excuses, excuses, _excuses!_" She darted forwards, surprising Nanoha when she grabbed the ace's collar and roughly pulled her close. "He's _abandoning_ us!" she hissed, right in the girl's face. "He doesn't even try to call us! It's barely been three months and already he's abandoning us!"

For a moment the two stayed there - then the false Nanoha threw the real one away from her in disgust. "And you deny it, make yourself blind to it when you _know_ we could put an end to his running away from us for good." She watched as the original came to a halt through the simple act of bouncing, lightly, off of the wall she had thrown her at. "Pathetic." She murmured, "and to think that you were the person who made such a masterpiece out of Fate."

The real Nanoha reacted to the name, her head snapping up in order to shoot the double a horrified look. "Wha... what about F-Fate?" she whispered, "I... We... _I_ saved her!"

"We _broke_ her!" The other Nanoha countered. "We took from her everything she had! We broke her so completely and then built her back up as our little _friend!_ Totally devoted and utterly dependent on _us!_ Even her mother wasn't able to manage that!"

"How does it feel, me!" The double screamed, a hideously joyous look plastered across her face. "Realizing that I, you, _we_ are a bigger monster than Fate's own mother!" Nanoha merely whispered something in response, causing the clone to lean forward curiously. "What?"

"Y... you..." stammered the ace. "You're... You're lying! You're not me!" she wailed at last, for the first time seeming to be little more than the young girl she really was underneath all her skill and power, "You can't be me so... so stop it! Just stop!"

"I can't!" The clone yelled back, "You can no more stop me than you can stop yourself! I _am_ you! Even if I'm gone I'll still be there inside you! Every doubt! Every fear! No matter how much you deny and justify - I will _always_ be there!"

"Stop it!" Nanoha wailed again, falling to the floor as she all but folded in on herself. "Just stop! I - I don't want to hear anymore!"

"Then," murmured the duplicate in a tone that was clearly full of dark amusement. "I will just have to use my devilish tools to make you listen."

_**BATTLE FANTASIA**_

They'd been studying in Rei's room again - a tradition that hadn't died just because everyone was in college these days - when the story hit the airwaves, and so missed the initial "breaking news bulletin." This was probably just as well, since there wouldn't have been a thing any of them could have done to stop what happened - at best, Usagi could have tried to work damage control and bring the poor girl back after... well, after.

Haruka called them over the communicators a few minutes later, informing the Inner Senshi of what was showing up on every news channel in country, one of the international networks, Youtube, Nico Nico, and every Japanese chat room and bulletin board in existence. Michiru's mirror and Setsuna's orb hadn't so much as hinted at it, though the latter apparently started going crazy as soon as the story hit the airwaves, prompting Setsuna to phase out to the Space-Time Gate with a hasty, "Excuse me sorry dimensional disturbance imminent paradox gotta go lock the Gate before it crashes and kills us all love you bye!" that would have been funny as hell if it occurred under any other circumstance.

Hearing the news, the Inner Senshi scrambled for the nearest TV, whipping out their respective PDAs - and the Mercury Computer - as they went, searching for the newsfeeds.

After about ten minutes of watching half a dozen angles and takes on the story, Minako turned to Ami with a deadly serious look in her eye that said the happy-go-lucky blonde wasn't home right now, and Sailor Venus was the one in charge.

"Find them, Mercury. Find them _right now_."


	4. Chapter 4

In the darkness of her bedroom, Kuroi Mato lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling, her thoughts awhirl with emotions. To an outside observer she may have appeared to have fallen asleep with her eyes open were it not for the incessant opening and closing of the cellphone she held lightly in one hand.

After a time, that activity ceased and Mato spared a glance at the phone's screen. Thirty more minutes. She folded her arms over her chest and took a calming breath, trying to get her emotions under control. Something particularly difficult as she couldn't help thinking again of the pain in Akiko-chan's eyes, the tears, the desperate emotions as she cried out for anybody who would listen…

A blue light illuminated the dark room and she quickly covered her left eye, cursing softly at her loss of control. Not surprisingly, her Other wasn't exactly thrilled with what Akiko-chan had gone through either. Teaching the other girl's monsters why people were scared to death of the burning blue flame was a plan they both eagerly anticipated executing.

She looked towards her door with a raised eyebrow. "You can come in," she called out.

"Sis?" her door was pushed open and a young boy meekly looked in.

"What's wrong, Hiro?" Mato asked, sitting up. The younger boy moved to sit next to his sister and looked down at his hands. "You watched," came the not quite question. The blue eyed boy nodded and Mato smiled, pulling him into a tight hug. "Hey, don't worry, she's okay now."

Hiro nodded mutely, clinging to his sister for a moment before pulling back. A knowing grin was plastered on his face as he looked up. "Mato's lucky mom was looking at the television. You had your scary eyes on." Mato could only cringe, thanking her lucky star mom hadn't noticed anything. They were having way too many close calls as it was. "Will you help her too?" The question earned him a toothy grin.

"Yep, we're going to do everything we can."

The upper half of a girl with an eye-patch over her right eye suddenly appeared above them, hanging in mid air. Neither sibling noted the girl's intrusion with any more alarm than one might note the color of their own shirt. "First we need to figure out how we're gonna do that, though," the spectral girl said, tilting her head a little to the side.

"We will, we will," Mato said, waving a hand dismissively. "Any luck on the ID hunt?"

"Just on Akiko's case, and that's because she pretty much handed it to me on a silver platter," replied the other girl with a shrug. "Haven't found much on White-chan and Black-chan yet."

"Keep looking," Mato said and Hiro gasped.

"You're trying to find their secret identities? Naoko-chan, they're supposed to be on your side!"

"Boss's orders!" the half-girl chirped, shunting all the blame onto Mato.

Before the oldest girl could reply, Hiro frowned and looked at the other two girls with an unusual seriousness. "Are you going to tell mom about, you know?"

Mato and Naoko exchanged a look and mumbled something that could be a "Telling mom, sure," and a "Yeah, I'll tell Mama Kuroi later."

An awkward silence descended on the room.

"Well, I'm going to the hill," Mato said as she suddenly stood up.

"Isn't it a bit too early?"

"I just want a moment on my own to think," Mato replied with a shrug and her siblings nodded. "Coming?"

The eye-patched girl mock shivered. "Too chilly for me, Mato. Don't stay up too late, Hiro-kun!" Naoko chirped with a cheeky grin.

The boy pouted, glaring at Naoko. "You're just a few years older than I am."

"Still older!" she cackled, waving them goodbye as she pulled back as if ducking into a hole and disappeared into thin air.

"Sis?"

"Hm?" Mato looked up from putting on a black hoodie.

"Are Mato, Naoko, Yomi and everybody going to be okay?"

Mato simply gave him a boyish grin. "We always are, bro. Go get some sleep now, 'kay?"

She opened the window above her bed and climbed out. She hung from one hand on the ledge above the window, ready to close it behind her when Hiro hurried forward, trying to be as silent about it as possible.

"Sis!" he whispered.

Mato tilted her head a little to the side in question.

"Think... Do you think I can help this time?"

Mato couldn't help chuckling at the question, and in the back of her mind she could feel a touch of interest. "Keep your eyes open. If a magical girl happens to be in your school, tell her she isn't alone and can ask her senpai for help," she said, waving goodbye to Hiro, sliding the window closed and climbing the wall with an ease that couldn't be natural. She took a moment to check her surroundings and then hopped over the rooftops on the other side of the street, making her way towards a hill surrounded by a park of cherry trees.

* * *

><p>"Nanoha! Signum!" Vita waved away the dust that filled the air as she clambered through the rubble left by Graf Eisen smashing through what she guessed was the seventh stone wall she'd wrecked today. After beating the monster bunny - a depressingly easy task given it had apparently been dead before she had blown it apart with her final attack - she had left the fake Hayate's room and gone searching for her companions. It hadn't taken long before she had given up wandering aimlessly and had gone right for option two - break stuff until she found something that looked important. "Where the hell are you two!"<p>

It was only her deeply ingrained combat instincts that made her snap a shield in place as a sphere of pink light came bursting out of the dust in front of her and almost took her head off. Instead it exploded harmlessly a few inches from her face - as a bonus the exploding magic blew away a good amount of dust, allowing Vita a glimpse at whoever had shot her... though given the magic's color she had an idea in mind already.

"Nanoha!" She yelled, launching herself forward at the barely visible white blob she could see through the fading dust cloud. If Nanoha was shooting at her then either she didn't realize it was Vita she shot at, was under some kind of illusion making her think Vita was someone else, or was being actively controlled in some way. Neither of the last two options was something she expected as both required magical finesse on a level she'd never seen herself but given how easily the owners of this factory had reached into her own mind earlier she wasn't going to rule them out.

Naturally the white figure slid to one side as the knight came at her. Even without Graf Eisen leading the way Vita knew that Nanoha wasn't stupid enough to stay in her flight path. Knowing this the knight was already turning to face the white-clad girl before she had even come to a stop... though when she actually got a good look at Nanoha she almost didn't stop as for a moment simple surprise overrode her control.

What she had thought was her friend was... _like_ her friend... and that was about the best way she could come up with to describe the... _thing_in front of her.

"You're... _who the hell are you?_" Vita hissed, pulling her weapon around into a ready position.

The white-clad figure laughed. "Isn't it obvious?" She asked, "I'm Nanoha!"

Vita could see that one could claim the figure to be Nanoha, but it was more like... like a caricature of Nanoha rather than the real thing. Certain parts were odd, distorted or exaggerated - as if whoever had created the girl had not been aiming to reproduce the things that Vita believed made Nanoha who she was. Perhaps another way of describing it would have been that this was a Nanoha from the wrong side of a fun-house mirror - she was slightly too tall, her eyes not quite level, her outfit more... girly... than the real Nanoha's was. Everything about her screamed 'Nanoha' and yet everything about her also screamed 'Not Nanoha'.

All in all it was pretty disturbing in ways Vita couldn't really put her finger on... But she could be sure of one thing at least. "Like hell you are." She hissed, "If you're the real Nanoha then I'm the Saint King!"

"You see what I mean, me?" The imitation asked as she looked down somewhere below Vita. "She's just downright unfriendly." The caricature shrugged and bought what Vita assumed was meant to be Raising Heart to bear on the knight. The device, like it's user, was just plain wrong - looking a lot less dangerous and a lot girlier than Vita remembered it being... though that didn't really change the fact that it was both in shooting mode and aimed at her.

Cutting her flight magic off cold the knight dropped like a rock as a wave of pink doom blasted the spot she had been in to vapor. As she fell she twisted in mid air and let loose with a brace of iron balls, accelerated to insane speeds by swinging her hammer into them with the kind of inhuman skill only a knight of her caliber could manage. Moments later she reactivated her flight magic and touched down on the ground safely before immediately throwing a quick shield up over her head. Above her the false Nanoha weaved around the shots and then darted away with a surprised squawk as the seemingly avoided shots instead hit the roof behind her and sent debris raining down from above.

Chunks of brick and shredded piping bounced harmlessly off of Vita's shield while she scanned the air for where the fake Nanoha had escaped to. Unfortunately along with the debris that had been part of her plan the destruction caused by her spell had caused yet another cloud of dust into which the fake had apparently retreated. Worse was that the same trick probably wouldn't work again unless the Nanoha copy was particularly stupid... and she suspected that was rather unlikely.

Backing up slowly, intending to find a wall to keep at her back, Vita continued to scan the area around her. She didn't think Nanoha would try a sneak attack - the girl was far too direct for something like that... but this fake wasn't really Nanoha and Vita was careful not to make assumptions on how she would act. As she backed away she moved her feet carefully, lifting one up and lightly checking behind her by feel before she put it down again - a method of stepping which ensured that she wouldn't slip or lose her footing as she moved.

Suddenly, and much to her surprise, one of her feet came into contact with neither thin air nor solid brick - instead she felt something that gave way with a whimper. Spinning around she swung her device... then stopped dead mid-swing when she realized who, exactly, she had bumped into.

It was hard, in many ways, to put into words the thoughts that passed through Vita's head while she stared horrified at the familiar girl in front of her... but in the end they summed themselves up in three little words.

_'She's so tiny.'_

It was an odd realization for the knight as she normally saw Nanoha as an equal in power, skill and stature to herself, an ancient Belkan knight with centuries upon centuries of training and experience behind her. For the first time she was struck by the simple fact that the combat mage she called both devil, rival and friend was... was just a little girl who up until a year ago hadn't even heard of magic much less magical combat. The brown-haired girl was curled up on the floor, her hands firmly pressed against her ears and her eyes screwed shut. Her barrier jacket had dissolved and left the young mage entirely unarmored in the light blouse and skirt she had apparently been wearing before she had come to see Hayate earlier.

A quick glance around revealed Raising Heart, in storage mode, resting nearby on the stone slab flooring where Nanoha had apparently dropped it. As Vita reached down to pick the jewel up she froze for a moment before suddenly hurling herself off to one side as a barrage of pink bullets blasted through the air above the downed Nanoha.

"Now now," the fake Nanoha called out from her firing position in the air some distance away. "The other me here is learning an important lesson, we really can't have you interrupting it."

Vita's eyes narrowed as she glared at the flying parody of the girl on the floor. "What the _hell_have you done to her?" She hissed, clutching the haft of Graf Eisen so tightly that her knuckles turned white underneath her gloves.

The distorted Nanoha shrugged. "Told her the truth." she stated, "Stripped away all those pesky little lies she's told herself over the years." The girl frowned for a moment before smiling widely. "In fact, why don't we begin another lesson! Tell me Vita - what's it like being a slave?"

"The hell?" The knight frowned, caught off-guard by the question. That surprise quickly changed to anger however. "Who the hell are you to call me a slave! Hayate would never treat us li-" she cut off quickly as she was forced to whip up a quick shield thanks to the false Nanoha taking a shot at her face.

"Who said anything about being a slave of Hayate?" the fake asked while the smoke from the attack cleared. "She is, after all, as much of a slave as you - moreso in fact, as you at least haven't fallen entirely into our 'friendship' as she has." Vita couldn't help but notice how the real Nanoha reacted to the word 'friendship', seeming to clutch her ears tighter and shaking her head in denial. The false Nanoha simply laughed at the apparent distress of the real one. "She just bent over backwards when we asked for her help, didn't she? So happy to throw you against an unknown enemy simply because we asked! Isn't friendship wonderful?"

"Hayate didn't do it because Nanoha asked." The knight hissed back, "she sent us out because it was right."

The fake stared at the red-clad girl for a few long moments before she started snickering to herself. "We always thought you were the stupid one," she managed to get out after a while, "but we never thought you were this stupid! Our friendship with Hayate is based on the same things every other friendship of ours is! Fear and force!" Adopting a condescending look towards the young knight the false Nanoha explained, "Hayate we own through fear! She knows that if we were to go off and tell a few people about what really happened with the Book of Darkness then the Bureau will be forced to change their minds on how they dealt with you!"

Vita winced noticeably as she considered the truth of that statement. It was true that she and the other Wolkenritter were in a dubious position regarding their involvement during that incident. Officially they were following 'accidental' orders from Hayate regarding their collecting of linker cores... truthfully they had been acting entirely on their own initiative. Worse, they had actually gone against Hayate's instructions if one considered her desire that they not need to hurt people anymore as an implied order - and the Bureau likely would.

If they were proven to be capable of outright ignoring orders then almost all their legal defenses, mostly based on the fact that Hayate could control them, would fall apart.

At that point a Bureau sanctioned destruction order would be the best result they could hope for.

Such a thing would absolutely _devastate_Hayate if it happened.

"You wouldn't!" The knight hissed, "Nanoha wouldn't!"

"Yes I would." At the sound of the voice, quiet as it was, Vita's eyes widened and she half twisted around to stare are where the real Nanoha had pulled herself upright and was now hugging her legs. "Because I'm... I'm a horrible person." she murmured, her words muffled by the way her head was pressed against her knees.

"But... you're _Nanoha_." It was not, really, the most intelligent thing the knight could have said - but right at that moment her mind was simply seizing up as it tried to mesh the idea of the girl in front of her with her definition of a horrible person. This was the girl who had spent every fight with the Wolkenritter trying to convince everyone to sit down and talk their problems over. The girl who seriously handicapped her combat ability simply because she didn't want to kill anyone. The girl who never held a grudge over anything, not even the time Shamal had literally ripped out her soul - and then went on to forgive them all for when they did the same to her best friend as well. And all that was just the start of the compassion she had showed for Vita, the other Wolkenritter and their master Hayate.

As a knight - no, as a _person_- she simply couldn't accept the idea that Nanoha was a horrible person... not even if Nanoha herself had claimed it to be so.

"A knight," she murmured, "Is supposed to hate the sin and not the sinner." The phrase was one of the few memories of her distant past that the childlike knight possessed. "I never understood what that was supposed to mean - until I met you." It had taken a long time before Vita had been able to understand that never, during everything that happened between them, had Nanoha ever actually hated any of the Wolkenritter. Instead she had merely hated the actions they had been forced to take and the methods they had chosen to use.

It had been a bitter pill for the knight to take because, in many ways, it meant admitting that Nanoha was a better knight than she was. The girl was loyal to a fault, protected the weak even to the point of handicapping her own magic in order to protect her enemies and she was definitely a more forgiving person than Vita could ever hope to be.

Now though... looking at the broken girl in front of her, Vita knew that Nanoha was no knight.

Admittedly she was both heavily armed and armored, and her skill was one that would likely secure her a place in history when she grew older... but deep inside her there simply wasn't the iron core of a knight. Rather there was the much more fragile core of a little girl who believed wholeheartedly in love and hope and simply couldn't conceive of a world in which those things didn't exist... Nanoha was a knight with the heart of a princess.

"It's a pity," Vita stated as she drew herself up to her full height and turned to face the fake Nanoha, the one responsible for her Nanoha's current state. "That I won't be able to follow your example."

There was a princess behind her, a little girl she had never imagined even existed before now. A Nanoha who had been shattered and had her broken self laid out for all to see. Looking at her hurt in a way Vita couldn't exactly describe, as never again would she be able to see Nanoha as the almost invincible opponent she had come to know. Where everyone else saw an ace of the skies, a genius combat mage or a true white devil... Vita knew that all she would ever be able to see from now on would be the fragile princess that hid behind all that strength, courage and skill.

"Because I'm not as kind as you are," the knight continued as she drew her device back with one hand and conjured a set of iron balls in the other. "Because I can't forgive people like you can." Before her was a monster. Behind her was a princess. For the first time since stepping into this god forsaken factory Vita knew exactly what she was doing. "Because unlike you I _am_ a horrible person - I am going to _destroy this bitch!_" Graf Eisen swung around, whipping through the air as the iron knight threw the contents of her other hand into the air. A split second later the balls met the oncoming hammer's head with an almost deafening crash of metal on metal.

_**"Schwalbe Fliegen!"**_The Iron Count cried as it immediately performed the precise calculations needed to impart a set amount of magical energy into the balls, turning them from simple spheres of iron into deadly projectiles which curved mid-flight towards where the false Nanoha floated. Though it was a device, and one without any real intelligence at that, it was almost as if the count had picked up on Vita's resolve as the projectiles moved faster and with more conviction than Vita could ever remember them ever doing before.

The false Nanoha, who had apparently been about to rebuke Vita when the knight had let fly her attack, was forced to fling herself to one side. Even with this quick reaction she was still grazed by a few of the balls - the trailing edge of her barrier jacket ripped almost to shreds by the sheer force of the projectile's passing alone. She hissed nastily, as if the damage to her outfit was a physical pain to her, before swinging her version of Raising Heart to bear on the red-clad girl. As Vita shot forwards to put some distance between herself and Nanoha the fake let loose with a stream of pink bullets, most of which missed Vita while those which were on target ended up being swatted out of the air by quick swings of Graf Eisen.

In an almost immediate reaction the fake shot downwards as Vita changed direction towards her, going airborne and making a wide horizontal swing in an attempt to either cave in her chest or shatter an arm. The end result was that Vita overshot her target while the mockery just about slid through the air underneath her in the opposite direction. Once she had passed underneath the knight the fake kicked her legs up and stalled her forward momentum as best she could - causing her to pivot around her feet and hang, momentarily, upside-down and facing Vita's now exposed back.

Her copy of Raising Heart locked in on the knight.

"Divine-" Vita panicked when she head the fake Nanoha begin calling out her attack. If it was anything like the original's then she knew she was pretty slim on options to deal with it. Her shields would just crumble and any barrier she tried may as well have been made of tissue paper when pit against the raw power of that attack.

On the other hand, it wasn't a Starlight Breaker - which meant she at least had a chance of not being blasted into unconsciousness... Or ash, she wasn't sure if this false Nanoha held to the original's policy of not killing and frankly Vita had no intention of finding out. Naturally that meant trying not to get hit by this attempt to take her down... if blocking was out then evasion was her only option but at the speed she was going there was no way in hell she could pull off a sharp enough mid-air turn. And it needed to be sharp because anything less wouldn't get her out of the Divine Buster's radius fast enough. Fate could have done it without trouble, Signum too maybe, but they were both faster and more agile than Vita was by far - unless she got creative.

"- Buster!" The knight lifted her hammer up and dragged it lightly against the ceiling until it caught on an overhead pipe. That, combined with her forward momentum, turned her straight dash into a very sudden and very sharp turn straight upwards. Bracing herself against what was going to be a painful impact Vita simply slammed into the ceiling and hissed a few choice curses. From there she directed her flight magic into simply keeping herself pressed against the cold brick just as the air below her was forcefully replaced with a beam of pink death. The knight grimaced throughout the next few moments as she muttered a quick prayer on the subject of Nanoha not knowing how to re-aim her divine buster mid-fire.

Thankfully for her it seemed that Nanoha, or at least this copy of her, couldn't do so.

While hanging inches away from that much energy was nerve-wracking as all hell Vita remained where she was until the pink beam finally flickered out. Only then did she let loose the breath she had been holding, along with a muttered thanks to the Saint King for responding to her prayer and saving her armor-clad rear. That done she cut her flight magic back and dropped down while spinning to face the duplicate - at which point she gave a cocky little wave... before conjuring a whole barrage of iron balls to throw by hand at the girl.

Such a move was hardly effective as a real attack, not without the balls being charged and launched by Eisen, but they were enough to keep her opponent occupied and unable to shoot back. Keeping her opponent from shooting had, after all, just shot up high in Vita's list of priorities now that the fake Nanoha had just shown off one of the real Nanoha's bigger attacks. This was a fact that made the knight panic somewhat as it implied the duplicate possessed all of the real Nanoha's attacks. If this was true then she was almost certain that sooner or later the fake Nanoha would make use of a Starlight Breaker... and that was something Vita really didn't want to be facing in a room that was smaller than the expected blast radius of a small Starlight Breaker.

In order to prevent that happening the knight really only had two options - simply defeat the false Nanoha before she could use her top spell or keep her from using enough attacks big enough to provide the energy for its later use. Unfortunately the former option was rather shaky as a plan since Vita simply had no idea how much energy there was already in the air, which meant she had no idea how long it would be before the fake Nanoha could even use the attack.

Not for the first time did Vita make a mental note to learn how to detect ambient magical energy. Though she knew how useful the ability could be from facing Nanoha before she had never bothered to learn, thinking it best suited to support type mages like Shamal rather than a close combat type like herself. Right now, however, the ability to tell when the false Nanoha had enough power in the air to try a Starlight Breaker would have been really, _really_nice.

This left Vita with the single option of keeping the fake Nanoha pinned down, which had it's own drawbacks as none of her attacks were really intended for that sort of use - they all prioritized breaking through heavy armor more than anything else. Currently her hand-thrown iron balls were doing the job but keeping up such a high rate of conjuration and throwing was rapidly draining the knight's magical stamina. Worse was the fact that the fake Nanoha wasn't even wasting her own stamina on barriers! She was dodging... everything... Vita... threw...

The knight's eyes widened as she finally grasped the one little detail that had been nagging at her from the back of her mind for a while now. This Nanoha had been dodging everything, even attacks which she should have easily been able to block. Not once had Vita seen her use a barrier or shield of any kind... which was unusual since if the fake was copying the real Nanoha's fighting style then she should have been using shields as if they were going out of fashion. Fate was the mage big on dodging, Nanoha had always been more about defending herself than evading attacks - so the fake's reliance on dodging seemed odd... Unless, for some reason, she _couldn't_block her attacks.

It was a good theory based on what she'd seen, but Vita was experienced enough to know that acting on an assumption usually ended badly - she would have to test the thought out first before trying to take advantage of it.

Throwing one last group of projectiles as a final distraction Vita launched herself forward and made an almost painfully lazy overarm swing at her opponent as she drew close. As she had expected the false Nanoha slid to one side to avoid the blow, which whipped down a few inches to her right. It was a blow which Vita knew the real Nanoha would have simply shielded herself against - though it was also an easy one to avoid, so she couldn't exactly consider it evidence for her theory yet. What it did do, however, was set her target up for a second strike which would prove or disprove her theory depending on how the fake Nanoha responded.

As her weapon came down past the level of her target's feet Vita leaned to one side and angled Graf Eisen so that she could use the weapon's momentum and redirect it all, spinning herself around and into a great horizontal smash. The trick wasn't hard exactly but the force of changing the weapon's direction at speed like that threatened to pull her arms from her sockets. More importantly it threatened to blow the false Nanoha's spine out through her stomach if she didn't use some kind of shield - the position she was in combined with the speed of the second attack made it almost impossible for her to simply duck away from.

Except she did.

Or rather she didn't, as instead of merely moving back and out of it's path the fake girl had thrown herself up and over the moving hammer as if she were a high jumper vaulting a bar. Of all the moves Vita had expected her to make that, most definitely, was not one of them. Which was why the iron knight was caught entirely flat-footed when the false Nanoha pointed one arm at her mid-vault, while Vita was off balance and entirely unable to dodge or counter, and simply shot her in the face.

Out of all the people present Vita was the one most surprised to find herself not dead. She knew how strong Nanoha was and she knew that a point blank shot like that from Nanoha should have ripped through her knight armor as if it was paper. While the real Nanoha would have held herself to stunning attacks she had expected the fake to be using lethal attacks... the fact that she wasn't dead meant that either the fake was also holding back or it was far weaker than the real Nanoha.

As before she was unwilling to make a guess either way but at least this time she had a clear course of action. All she had to do was not get hit again and then it really wouldn't matter what kind of attack power the false Nanoha possessed.

Quickly the knight pulled away from her opponent before she could take another close-range shot. If nothing else Vita had at least confirmed her idea that the fake apparently couldn't defend herself. There was after all no way anyone would have resorted to such an absurd evasion if they could have blocked that attack of hers. Hopefully this meant that all she needed to beat the fake would be to land just one good hit... a task made significantly more difficult by the fact that this Nanoha was almost as fast as Signum or Fate and seemingly much more acrobatic than either.

She was pretty sure she knew why too. Throughout and even before the fight she had been noticing various things about the duplicate which were only now starting to add up in her mind. The fact that this fake was more feminine than the real Nanoha, the way she fought, her speed and her agility... Vita was pretty sure that this fake wasn't a copy of Nanoha herself but a copy of what Nanoha thought she was.

All these factors which were exaggerated were those that the real girl must have believed to be her notable features. Of course the young girl thought she looked more 'girly' since even someone as modest as Nanoha had some vanity over her appearance. The combat style was likely what Nanoha thought hers was like too, as Vita doubted that the real Nanoha was experienced enough to really look at her style with a truly objective mindset yet. It also explained why Vita still had an intact head. If this clone was copying how Nanoha believed she fought then it seemed more than likely that it had unintentionally copied her constant holding back too.

So the false Nanoha was faster and more agile but seemed weaker and was potentially unable to take a direct hit.

She could work with that.

Taking a deep breath the red-clad girl calmed herself and surveyed the battlefield. Part of her watched the Nanoha in front while another, almost separate, part scanned for the real Nanoha. It was a trick most experienced warriors learned so as to focus on their enemy and their surroundings at the same time. Right now she was simply making sure the real Nanoha wouldn't be caught in what she was about to do as without her barrier jacket it could be injuring, if not lethal, were she to be hit by accident.

She was forced to dodge a few shots from her opponent as she continued to survey the area and moved around to a better location for her plan. Once she was satisfied that the real Nanoha was out of the way she shot down towards the ground. As she descended she let loose with a spread of iron balls in a circle around where she would land, all launched with the full power of normal-form Graf Eisen. She didn't want to blast clear through to the floors below, merely make as much mess and flying debris as she could.

The false Nanoha glanced around the room, her vision cut off by the clouds of dust Vita's move had kicked into the air. Suddenly her eyes locked onto a patch of the dust cloud and she flung herself to one side as Vita came shooting out of it. Had she remained where she was then Vita's device, hanging been swung overhand, would have crushed her skull like some over-ripe fruit. The fake attempted to throw a few shots at Vita's back but by the time she had turned to face her the knight was already safely hidden out of sight in the dust again.

A few moments later Vita shot out of the cloud once more, this time from a different direction, and again the fake Nanoha was simply able to slide to one side and avoid her strike. Again Vita simply vanished into the dust before she was able to shoot the knight in response... and once more the attack was repeated. This third time Nanoha began turning even she dodged. Thanks to that she was able to hit the girl, though her shots just splashed harmlessly against Vita's knight armor.

Growling to herself she spun slowly in place, her head whipping to and fro as she tried to predict where Vita would come at her from next.

Suddenly, reacting to a faint movement in the cloud, she threw herself to one side and spun to shoot Vita as she narrowly avoided Graf Eisen once more. Her hand whipped up and ... and...

Vita wasn't there.

All she could see was the knight's device, spinning through the air as it vanished into the cloud of dust. Eyes widening, she turned, much too slowly back towards the direction that the hammer had come from.

That was when the young knight smashed into her, fist first, in a manner not unlike an angry red comet.

The doppelganger reeled back from the blow, it's face distorted like soft clay around a vast and disturbing dent imprinted where Vita's fist had struck. "You!" It warbled, it's mouth and jaw not able to pronounce words properly thanks to the distortion. "You struck m-"

Whatever it was going to say was cut off as the iron knight punched it again, though with significantly less force and this time in the stomach. Unarmed combat wasn't something Vita was confident in but it had been impossible for her to have lived alongside Zafira without learning a few tricks to make use of. Which was why, as she retracted her fist her hand moved up to grab hold of the fake's barrier jacket.

"You call yourself Nanoha," the knight snarled as her other hand moved to join the first in holding onto the fake's clothes. "Don't make me laugh." She drew back her head. "Nanoha is a kind person! Don't you dare-" The knight's head whipped forward then, her forehead smashing into the fake's face. "- tell me any different!"

The fake staggered back in the air, blinded and disorientated by the injury, as Vita let go of her clothes for a moment.

_**"Racketenform"**_

Cursing the doppelganger swung to face the voice, knowing from Nanoha's memories that it was the voice of her opponent's device. Too late did she realize the trick as a pair of arms came from behind where they looped around her own and up to grasp each other just behind her neck.

She struggled to free herself as, from in front, she heard an approaching roar and saw a dull orange glow lighting up the dust cloud.

Moments later Graf Eisen burst out from the cloud alone and spinning end over end so fast that it's steel frame seemed to blur into what looked like a giant flying buzz saw. And thanks to Vita's restraining hold, the doppelganger had no chance to avoid it.

Not that she didn't try - she all but flung herself from one side to the other in an attempt to shake off the knight's hold but Vita held firm right up until the moment Eisen impacted. At that point she dropped her hold and her flight magic as even if Graf Eisen was her device she sure as hell wasn't going to stay in it's path when it was going at that speed.

It was a good thing too as the doppelganger was quite literally ripped in two by the spinning weapon. Had Eisen possessed an edge then the fake would have been bisected, but since it was a blunt weapon the result was significantly... messier. The mess didn't last long however as within moments the remains of Vita's opponent began to dissolve and evaporate into a rapidly dispersing cloud of black smoke.

After all that the act of retrieving her device and floating back down to the real Nanoha was almost anticlimactic.

"Nanoha..." the knight murmured when she found the brown-haired girl huddled in one corner of the room. Looking at her she knew that she couldn't make the girl carry on any further, not in that condition at least.

Sighing to herself she crouched down and slipped one arm under one of Nanoha's own in order to lift her into a standing position.

Destroying the factory and completing the quest Hayate had bestowed was important but if Vita was going to be absolutely honest with herself then Nanoha was even more important.

She smiled slightly. "Let's find Signum," she whispered, "and then get the hell out of here. We can just level the place from outside before we go."

* * *

><p>Mato crouched atop of a building, stopping for a moment to make sure there was no prying eyes around. At that hour of the night she didn't have to put much effort to hide herself but it never hurt to make sure. By now, most people was already safely in their homes, away from the cold and dangers of the night, some sleeping already while others were probably talking about what they had seen in the news that night.<p>

The tomboy closed her eyes, teeth grinding against each other.

**'Calm down,'** a voice whispered in the back of her mind and Mato snorted.

"I can't," she muttered darkly, "She's been alone for so long, fighting all by herself, and pretty much next door and I never realized anything was wrong!"

**'None of them knew about us either,'** the other replied calmly. **'They would have contacted us otherwise.'**

Logically, she knew that was the case, but that didn't ease the weight in her chest.

She shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts before a smile grew on her face. She looked towards the top of the hill, at the lookout point surrounded by a park and she launched herself over the rooftops, speeding towards her destination. With a final push she soared above the park and looked down at the peak of her jump with a relieved smile. Four girls were already waiting at the top of the hill. She slowed her descent until she was floating a few steps in front of the quartet.

She touched ground and walked closer to the other four girls, their emotions easy to read even in the dark. Their eyes showed worry, eagerness and an unbreakable determination, and Mato felt her chest swelling with pride.

But underneath those emotions, beyond what normal human eyes could see, Mato saw darkness crawling over her friends, enveloping them like a second skin. Growing and twisting into monstrous forms, forming horns, tails and wings, bladed, armored and deadly limbs of black bone and steel. Waves of brutality, bloodlust and a barely contained excitement washed over her, and she felt a smirk pulling the corner of her lips.

A normal person wouldn't have noticed anything unusual about the group.

"You're early," she said with a gentle smirk.

Naoko suddenly appeared in mid air, landing gracefully on her feet. "I may have told 'em you wanted to be alone, Boss," the eye-patched girl said, tapping her black eye-patch once, causing a little purple light to glow on the edges of the black fabric. Once she said her piece, the little girl moved to sit down on the bench Junko and Yuu were sitting at. A black computer materialized on Naoko's outstretched hand and she started to type away, ignoring the rest of the world.

"Unruly, naughty delinquents," Yuu sniffed in disappointment with such a straight face Mato couldn't help chuckling. "You girls can't even think about poor Mato's feelings, can ya?"

"The things I have to deal with," Mato muttered, sharing a toothy grin with Yuu as Mayu and Yomi groaned in the background.

"Well, since the cavalry is here what are the ord-."

"Hold on a moment!" Mayu shouted, and despite not moving from her place, the tall girl's presence alone was enough to make it seem as if she were looming over the two shorter girls. "Let's get this out of the way. You're _not_ going to take us on a wild chase around Tokyo looking for those girls, Mato!"

Yuu started to snicker and she extended an open hand; Naoko pouted in silence, handing her friend a few bills.

The blue eyed girl groaned tiredly, scratching the back of her head. "Really Mayu? You're not even going to let me say anything at all?" she fired back, and a twisted smile started to grow on her lips but she stopped it with a sigh.

Any other day she would have gladly get in an escalating glaring contest with Mayu -which would have probably ended up with both of them broken and bleeding all over the place-, but not at the moment.

"What's there to say?" Mato was pushed back when Mayu poked her in the chest with enough strength to punch holes through concrete, but the tomboy stubbornly stood her ground. "_Let's go girls! Let's find Akiko-chan and save the day!_" she said in a mockingly high and whiny voice.

Mato bypassed any kind of poke, instead punching Mayu square in the chest with a dull _whumph_, forcing Mayu a step back. In the background, Naoko passed another bill to a grinning Yuu.

"First of all, I don't sound like that," Mato growled through gritted teeth. "Second: Don't pretend you don't want to help, Mayu. I know you well enough. You want to help and crush whatever monsters drove that girl to the edge, no matter how grumpy you try to act, and... you know what's like to fight all on your own."

The tall girl looked away for a moment, running a hand through her hair before squaring her shoulders, glaring down at her friend. "How would you help Mato? We have no idea where they are at the moment! What happened to Akiko is bad, but she's already in good hands. She's not our responsibility! She's not _your_ responsibility!" Mayu yelled and Mato could see the taller girl's eyes starting to glow.

"We can't just stand back and pretend nothing happened! We knew already there were other supernatural things out there, not only here in Japan but probably the rest of the world!" Mato shouted back and she could feel her own eyes changing. "Even if you won't help, that doesn't mean I won't help either!"

Mato's head snapped back when Mayu bashed their heads together with a deafening sound. Without missing a beat Mato returned the favor, both girls refusing to give any ground. "Don't you dare force our hand like that!" the red eyed girl hissed. "If you go, we will follow you, you know that! If you try to pull a stupid stunt like that I won't have any qualms making you stay here!"

The crimson glow in Mayu's eyes grew, and complex and glowing designs started to form in her eyes. Mato knew her own eyes had transformed were just like that.

She was about to reply when a raspy growl interrupted them.

"**Annoying,"** both girls turned to look at Yuu who was looking at then in boredom with her own glowing, golden eyes. Junko was also looking at them, but her green eyes held an expression of worry behind her glasses. Even Naoko had taken her eyes away from her computer to stare at her diminutive friend across the bespectacled Junko. **"Stop fighting... or I'll rip off your arms."** The ashen haired girl blinked once and her eyes returned to their usual honey colored hue, and an impish grin grew immediately on her face. "Well, you heard the voice of reason!"

Yomi, who had been quiet until now broke into peals of giggles that she somehow managed to make sound sweet to Mato's ears. The change in the atmosphere was enough to snap the girls from their shouting match and they each took a step back.

"Well, miss Voice of Reason what do you propose then?" the elegant girl inquired, brushing a curly lock of hair away from her green eyes.

Yuu leaned lazily against Junko with a big grin. "Why, voting of course."

"That's actually sensible," Yomi said mirthfully with a hand against her cheek. "I'm shocked!"

"I know, sometimes I surprise myself. I vote we get involved yesterday, so that makes it two against one for staying, right Mayu-chan?"

The glare the tall girl gave Yuu had been enough to stop many monstrous and brutal creatures on their tracks in the past. Yuu simply gave her a cheeky grin.

"Actually," Mato glanced at her girlfriend as she raised her hand. Yomi gave her an apologetic smile and Mato sighed a little, giving her a comforting smile that made the green eyed girl's frown turn into a look of relief. "I agree with Mayu. We cannot just jump in the middle of this without any kind of plan or intel. We have no idea what Akiko-san has fought or if we can help fight them. Whatever her enemies are, they did such a good job on her that they didn't need to finish the job.

"I want to help too, but not unless we know more about what we are going to face. The idea of stepping in a conflict where we can have all the odds against us isn't all that comforting."

"So, we have a tie then," Mato said and looked at the trio of sitting girls.

"I forfeit my vote!" Naoko immediately shouted.

There was a moment of silence before Mato, Yuu and Yomi started chuckling. **"Coward,"** instead of the gentle and comforting tone, Yomi's voice came out as a dark purr that sent a thrill of emotion to the back of Mato's mind.

"It's all about maths, you know?" Naoko replied with a careless shrug.

"Then..." Mayu muttered, looking at their bespectacled friend.

"That means..." Mato joined her.

"Oh dear," Yomi was the last one to join.

Junko stared back for all of three seconds and then Mato could easily see the train of thoughts going through her friend's mind. Confusion, realization and about-to-get-ran-over-by-a-truck shock.

"I can't decide for the entire team!" she said, managing to make herself look smaller despite sitting between two girls that made her look taller to begin with. "I-I give up my vote too!"

"Junko?" Mato approached the green haired girl, who was still shaking her head in negative. "I called you all here for a reason. Mayu was right, I can't force any of you to do something you don't want to," she told her gently, patting Junko gently on her head. "This is a decision I can't make on my own, I need you girls, you all are way smarter than I am," Mato ignored the sardonic snort coming from Mayu, instead glad that the peanut gallery managed to ease the tension from Junko's back.

"But Mato, you're the leader, you haven't led us stray so far. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for you," Junko replied without hesitation. "If it were up to me..." she trailed off, looking away.

"That's because I trust your judgment, all of you," she said, looking at all her friends, "You guys make things easy, I know that you won't let me do something stupid," she said with a chuckle, earning a smile from the bespectacled girl.

"I... I don't even know if those two girls are actually helping Akiko-san or not," she whispered and Mato could only frown a little. She had thought the same, but she had told herself that Akiko-chan _was_ in good hands or she would have gone crazy with worry. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the rest of her friends considering the option for the first time with different degrees of worry.

"But, what I know is that there are monsters out there that could try to attack our families. Monsters that need to be stopped," Junko's voice started to raise in volume and Mato felt a smirk tugging her lips at the sight of a green flame appearing in her friend's eyes. "I don't know if we can help Akiko-san, but I want to make sure our loved ones are safe as soon as possible!"

"Yay!" Yuu cheered and pulled Junko in a hug that lifted the taller girl off the ground.

"Down, Yuu, down," Mato chuckled, feeling the weight in her chest easing big time. The short girl obeyed, putting a relieved Junko back on the ground.

The blue eyed girl looked at Mayu and Yomi and cocked her head to the side. "Well, three to two."

"We can't go halfassed about this," Mayu immediately said.

"Of course not. That ain't our style after all," Mato said with a smirk that made Mayu and Yomi mutter about _"their usual style."_

"Then what's the plan, Fearsome leader?" Naoko asked with a grin, finally closing her laptop.

"I'll start scouting Tok- come on! I won't go looking for troubles!" Mato groaned, seeing the looks her friends were giving her. She wasn't _that_ stupid. "I can cover more ground on my own, so I'll scout the place and see how Otherworld is holding up in the area. As soon as more people find out what happened, Tokyo's Otherworld will get chaotic. I'll make sure things don't get bad enough to cause an unscheduled breakdown. If I find any threat I'll come back and get you all. Good so far?"

Nobody wanted to knock her on the head so she took that as her cue.

"Naoko, I still want you to find anything you can about those other two girls, but I also want you to check on Akiko's life; Mayu and Junko, help her too, there must be clues about what Akiko has been fighting. Yomi, Yuu get your domains cleaned up in case we need to take normal people into Otherworld in an emergency and keep an eye open for anything on the news that can lead us to people who may need help. Sound good enough?"

"You have actually been thinking?" Mayu gasped in mock surprise, taking a step back. Mato gave her the finger for that.

"We can iron details later but sounds good enough," Yomi replied with a smile but her face then twisted into a displeased pout. **"Aww, come on you two,"** the elegant girl sighed in a sultry tone, circling Mato's neck with her slender arms. The tomboy simply looked at her movement with a resigned smile. **"Why must we walk on eggshells like this?"** In a blink, her hand reached up and grabbed a fistful of Mato's hair. With a non too gentle pull, 'Yomi' made Mato look up at her suddenly glowing green eyes, and Mato couldn't help a hiss escaping her lips. **"Rock, why don't you tell Mato that it would be so much more fun if we just track down Akiko-kun and let her tell us where we can start killing stuff?"**

Mato smirked at 'Yomi' before her blue eyes started to glow and her face relaxed into a neutral, bored expression. **"Dee."** The single word came from Mato's mouth as little more than a whisper, but the message was clear. Black Rock Shooter's blue flame flickered out of Mato's left eye, a tongue of fire arching to lick 'Yomi's' arm like a gentle caress. **"Later."**

'Yomi' giggled, pulling back after trailing a finger over Mato's cheek. _**'You two are no fun'**_, Mato heard the thought coming from within Yomi and a beat later Yomi's eyes returned to normal and she ran a hand over her face, sighing in annoyance. "Not now Dee."

"Any more objections?" Mato asked. Nobody else had one, and Mato _'heard'_ other four replies in the back of her head. "Then tomorrow we go hunting."


	5. Chapter 5

Fate stood outside the door to her room, where the girl she had rescued had been left, for several long moments.

Not long after she had admitted to Lindy what she suspected Nanoha was up to, and received a whole new lecture from the woman, she had been sent up here. Lindy had asked her to speak with the girl she had rescued, to find out what sort of things she had told Nanoha and more importantly what she _hadn't_told the trigger-happy girl.

No doubt, Lindy had said, her friend had heard about how mean Akiko's opposition were and left then and there without sticking around to find out what said opposition actually _did_.

Sadly that was... probably true. Nanoha did have a tendency to think more with her heart than her brain and hearts, as she had been taught, usually didn't think of consequences.

But that was what friends and allies were for, right? To support one another where they were weak and to let their strengths become others strengths and... and...

And Akiko hadn't had that until now.

Knowing this meant Fate had found herself stuck outside her own room as she didn't know how to approach the situation at all. She knew what Akiko needed, sort of, she needed what Fate herself had needed almost a year ago... Someone who could pull her out of the darkness, give her hope and maybe help her find herself.

In Fate's case that someone had been Nanoha... and Fate was acutely aware that she _wasn't_Nanoha. She wasn't as kind, she wasn't as forgiving or as caring or anything like the kind of person Nanoha had been when she had saved her!

How was someone like that expected to approach the seemingly broken girl?

What was she supposed to say? What was the supposed to do?

Nanoha, earlier, had just rushed in to talk with Akiko without thinking - but she couldn't do that as all she could see was all the hundreds of ways in which things could go wrong. What if she scared the girl? What if she said something that made her freak out or relapse or any one of those other things Amy had warned her to be careful of? What would she even talk about? It wasn't like she could just up and ask the questions Lindy wanted answered right off the bat, right?

Maybe she should talk about something simple? Like... like the weather? Except she probably didn't care about that... School maybe? Except Akiko was old enough to be in high school and Fate wasn't, so she didn't really know what to say about the subject...

Fate grimaced as every option she came up with seemed to reach a dead-end in her mind. Boys? No, aside from Yuuno and Chrono she didn't really know much on such a subject - especially not if Akiko was anything like Nanoha's sister, who could go on for _hours_ about boys at her school when prompted. Magic perhaps? Or not, she doubted Akiko would want to hear _anything_about magic after what she'd apparently been through...

The blond girl's head thumped against the door in front of her. She had no idea what to talk about at all! She didn't want to go in without a plan but every plan she had was _wrong_!

If only she could be more like Nanoha and just...

Her head rose as a thought occurred.

Why _couldn't_she be more like Nanoha?

All she had to do was ask herself: What Would Nanoha Do?

* * *

><p>Apparently it turned out that 'What Nanoha Would Do' was to simply stride straight into the room loaded for bear with snacks and tea.<p>

Admittedly Nanoha would probably have forgone the snacks but Fate had been spotted fretting by Amy, who had casually stated to herself that she didn't know if Akiko had eaten at all today. The fact that she had done it quite deliberately within earshot of Fate hadn't been missed by the girl, who had given the older girl a muttered thanks on her way to the kitchen.

She also didn't miss the fact that there had been a far too convenient tray, loaded with food, already sitting ready for her to collect. For that Fate had already promised herself to buy Amy some cake the next time she visited Nanoha's parent's bakery.

When she returned with the tray she had simply made herself not even _think_of stopping outside her room. Instead she simply pulled the door open and stepped right in. "Hello!" She called out, "I have some sna-"

She trailed off at the sight of the older girl sitting up on her bed, looking through a thick binder which Fate knew contained her own school homework. She was wearing what looked like one of Amy's nightshirts and given that her old clothes had recently been put in to wash she was probably wearing some of Amy's underwear too.

Fate waved her free hand at the girl. "Um... hello?" she tried again, causing the girl to look up and show a pair of heavily reddened eyes. Not all that surprising given how hysterical she had been until recently... But it was still rather heart-wrenching to see evidence of the fact that the girl had been crying almost non-stop since Fate had caught her yesterday.

The girl seemed to flinch slightly before looking away, the binder coming up like a shield between her and Fate.

Smiling in what she hoped was a reassuring manner Fate stepped further into the room, making sure to keep her movements calm and non-threatening. The girl on her bed now seemed much, much calmer than the one she and Nanoha had brought to the house that morning. At that time she had been pretty hysterical still, a fact that probably hadn't been helped by the several nightmares she had woken up from during the night.

Not that Fate could really blame her for those as she had just tried to kill herself and according to Nanoha's father nightmares were the least someone would walk away from such an event with. Unfortunately they had left the girl an absolute wreck throughout the journey from Tokyo to Uminari and she hadn't improved much at all until Amy and Lindy had returned home. Even then she had been babbling, in between bouts of crying, and she assumed that Nanoha had learned what she knew simply by listening to that.

How her friend had been able to make anything intelligible out of Akiko's hysteria was a mystery to Fate... but in the end she had just chalked it up to the fact that Nanoha was better at understanding people than she was. Amy had learned a few things too, but clearly not as much as Nanoha had done since while the technician knew where to look for the so-called 'Nightmare Factory' she had admitted that the location was about the only clear thing she had understood. Nanoha on the other hand had sounded as if she'd heard most of the girl's life story already.

After Nanoha had left Amy had come downstairs claiming that Akiko had fallen asleep and from the way she had said it Fate was pretty sure it had not been without some assistance from Mid-Childan medical technology. Given that the now awake girl wasn't babbling of crying anymore it seemed as if the nap had done her a proverbial world of good.

"I have some snacks here," Fate explained as she walked over to the little side-table that sat beside her bed and carefully deposited the tray of food atop it. "Some tea and biscuits mostly, though there's some cake fro-" She cut off suddenly as something sharp poked into her side.

"Who are you?" Came a quiet hiss from the bed. Fate began to turn towards the speaker before another sharp poke stopped her. "Don't move!" The voice added. "Who are you - and where am I?"

"Fate Testa-" The blond mage paused, "I-I mean, Fate Testarossa Harlaown." She winced slightly when the object poking her pushed a little harder. "My name changed a while ago," she explained quickly. "I'm still... still getting used to it." The pressure receded and the young mage allowed herself to glance over at her attacker - who she knew for sure was Akiko herself.

The older girl had rolled over on the bed in order to threaten Fate with what seemed to be a makeshift weapon of some kind. Only the heavens knew where she had got the materials to make it from though. Especially since Fate knew the contents of her room were pretty sparse still, only school supplies and clothing really.

Right now the girl was staring at her with suspicious eyes as she appeared to be murmuring to herself. "Fate... Fate... Fate and... Nanoha?" she muttered finally, her tone part way between a statement and a question.

Suddenly her eyes widened and Fate felt the weapon poking into her side pull away quickly.

"I... I'm sorry!" Akiko wailed, drawing away from the blond girl and pressing herself against the far wall. "I'm sorry! I-I didn't think... I thought that... I-I mean-!"

"I didn't know you were _real_!"

* * *

><p>"Miss Yamaguchi..." Fate began before immediately trailing off as she struggled to think of a diplomatic way to ask what she wanted to ask. After a few moments she was forced to simply give up and forge ahead anyway. "Why... why did you try to kill yourself?"<p>

The silence that followed her question was almost suffocating in it's intensity. Even the background sounds of everyday life, passing traffic, distant conversations, birdsong... all of it seemed to fade away as Akiko turned to regard the younger girl.

Fate shrank back despite herself as the older girl just stared at her with eyes that, if she had to describe them, could only be called 'dead'.

"How old are you?" She asked after a while, her voice quiet. "Eight? Nine?"

"N-Nine." Came the reply as the younger mage attempted to recover her composure. "Ten in a few months."

"Ah." Akiko leaned back against the wall on the far side of Fate's bed and closed her eyes. "When I was ten..." she began softly, "...I beat my best friend to death with a barbell."

"Wh-what!" Fate paled at the statement.

The older girl simply continued as if she either didn't notice or didn't care about Fate's reaction.

"She... she ran away to the circus, or at least that's what _they_ used to call it." One of Akiko's eyes opened slightly and she stared at Fate with a vague, unfocused look.. "My best friend got turned into a monster that I had to beat to death by hand - and that's one of my _better_memories."

Fate remained silent as she quite honestly had no idea what to say - though she was a little worried that Akiko didn't seem upset by what she was saying and the fact she seemed to be staring vaguely off into space instead didn't help.

She'd heard the term 'thousand yard stare' once or twice when overhearing conversation about herself aboard the _Athra_... and she wondered if this was what it meant. Had she looked like that to Nanoha? No wonder the girl had known she was in such need of help back then...

"And yet," the older girl continued as she suddenly turned to look away from the younger mage, "memories like that were not really why I did it at all. Isn't that strange?"

"You said you couldn't take it anymore." Fate pointed out, "Ah, when we saw you on the television - you said you wanted to be saved."

"Seven years is a long time to be alone." muttered Akiko. "In the end it came down to one thing." The dark-haired girl turned to stare at Fate, who almost instantly flinched away from the haunted look the girl wore. "I just couldn't take being alone anymore. Either someone would save me or... or I wouldn't have to worry about it anymore. That's all."

She looked down and Fate watched as the girl pulled her legs up and hunched forward to hug her knees. There was a muffled sniffing, sobbing noise for a moment before Akiko looked up again - the mask of seeming calm she'd managed to maintain throughout the conversation finally breaking down to reveal the hysterical girl from earlier.

"Thank you for saving me." she managed to choke out. "But... I... I don't want you involved anymore."

* * *

><p>'<em>I don't want you involved<em>'

That sounded suspiciously familiar. Perhaps not the wording but the intent behind the statement most certainly did. It sounded like the warnings she had given Nanoha back when she had first met the girl almost a year ago. Warnings to stay away, warning to leave her alone, warnings that Nanoha had ignored entirely.

And now... now she knew why. Just like Akiko now she, back then, had been saying 'stay away' with her words and actions while screaming 'help me' with her eyes and heart.

"Half a year ago," she begin in a quiet voice, "I lived with my mother. Not Lindy but my real mother, the woman who... who made me." It had taken weeks of therapy on Mid before she had been able to come to terms with the truth of her origin. Even now it was still a subject which she didn't like to bring up without good reason. But right now she needed a way to connect with the girl in front of her - she knew that unlike Nanoha simply being enthusiastic and friendly wouldn't work. Her personality was too isolated, too withdrawn for something like that... or at least according to her therapist it was as she had repeatedly commented on Fate's normally non-communicative nature.

Fate swallowed slightly. "I... I am, was, a clone." Was. _Was_a clone. Now she wasn't, now she was just herself, her own person - Fate T Harlaown. Not 'the clone of Alicia Testarossa' anymore.

It was still difficult to say though.

She saw Akiko stiffen and narrow her eyes - not the reaction she had expected but one that implied certain things. Did the older girl have prior experience with clones perhaps? If so then they hadn't been good ones if the way she was attempting to stealthily reach for her weapon was any indication.

"My mother created me to replace her daughter." Fate continued, one of her hands dropping down and twitching slightly as she pre-prepared a shield spell just in case. "A perfect replica - her age, her voice, her memories and her personality were all copied exactly... just like she had intended she had her daughter back." She swallowed after she said that, talking about it was... harder than she thought. Explaining everything was the only way she could see to win Akiko over however. Where Nanoha used simple enthusiasm and sheer stubbornness to get through to people Fate was going to use something else, the truth of her own past, to convince the older girl.

"You weren't." The mage blinked when Akiko spoke up, though her voice was almost whisper quiet. The older girl had her face buried against her knees in such a way that her eyes were just about visible above them and underneath her hair. Fate frowned slightly as she considered the response. From the sound of it perhaps someone important to the other girl had been cloned? She filed that point of information away for later questioning as right now it was more important that she get Akiko to trust her rather than to interrogate her.

"No," she replied. "I wasn't. But to me I was her daughter, her only daughter, and she loved me as such." It hurt Fate to be talking about this, to be airing some of the things that she had never fully admitted to anyone outside her therapist to someone who was effectively a stranger. It didn't help that this stranger was really the second person she had ever spoken to at any real length about this either. While she had talked to both Nanoha and Lindy about it she had never really gotten into any details of how she felt about it all. Possibly, according to her therapist, out of a sense of embarrassment or inadequacy compared to them both - after all they had fully functioning families and she... didn't. "My memories were those belonging to my... to my _sister_... they were filled with the love and trust of and for my mother. To me, she could do no wrong."

Fate took a breath and paused, biting her lower lip for a few moments as she looked at the approaching conversational hurdle. After another deep breath she simply closed her eyes and went for it.

"So when she started beating me I thought it was all my fault." As soon as she said it she winced slightly but quickly forced herself to look at Akiko's reaction. It was hard to tell thanks to how red they were but the older girl's eyes appeared to dim slightly and Fate was sure they drifted downwards for a moment.

"What..." The girl began, "What does that have to do with anything?"

Fate shifted uncomfortably in her seat at that response. She wasn't by nature a violent person but that question came awfully close to making her one. Evidently Akiko picked up on this as she almost immediately turned away from the younger girl.

"It has everything to do with you," the younger mage stated while doing her best to keep her voice calm and level. "Because one day my mother found out about a collection of... items... that she thought she could use to bring back... bring her daughter back."

"She sent you to get them." Akiko's response wasn't a question but Fate answered it with a nod anyway. She also filed it away as interesting - not many would have made that connection so quickly, maybe it meant that a similar scheme had been used against her? That, or so the mage felt, could explain why Akiko reacted badly to the earlier reveal that she was a clone.

"I thought - if I just did well enough, it would make her happy," she admitted, "maybe she would love me again." That had been a hard thing to admit, though it was easier than when she first admitted it during her therapy sessions. Mainly because to say it meant admitting to herself that no, her mother hadn't really loved her - and of course that led to the suggestion that she had never truly loved _Fate_at all.

The dark-haired girl's head shook from side to side. "It doesn't work that way. Once they hate you, they hate you."

The blonde winced. From the sound of that Akiko had parental issues too - that could explain her reaction to the admission of her own abuse. Heck, if it wasn't for the earlier admission of murdering her friend then Fate would have been willing to guess the older girl had been abused herself. As it was the girl seemed so traumatized in general that it would be impossible to make an educated judgment on the matter. Still, it was something to bring to Lindy's attention later and discovering this was a good sign that her decision to explain her own circumstances had been a worthwhile one.

"... She always said she loved me. Until the very end, I -." Fate paused and thought for a moment. "... I _had_to try. I thought that if I was able to bring her the items - jewel seeds - then things would work out." She smiled slightly then as the memories of that time and the events that followed came into focus within her mind. "But someone stopped me. A naive girl who didn't know the meaning of 'moderation'. We fought... She tried to reach out me and I fought to keep her away - maybe even tried to kill her."

She wasn't too sure on that last point herself really. Certainly she had done things which _could_have killed Nanoha but back then she had been such a mess that even now she had trouble sorting out what she had intended at the time. Her therapist had helped some on that score but the confusion was still there.

Or perhaps she just didn't want to admit the truth to herself - she honestly didn't know.

"That girl spent every fight trying to make me listen to her, trying to make me _talk_to her. But all I could say was 'don't talk to me' and 'don't get involved'." The young mage was slightly pleased to see Akiko perk up ever so slightly at the use of the phrase she had thrown in Fate's face earlier. "But that girl didn't listen. She kept trying to be involved, kept asking to talk, to help... because she knew I was lying."

Akiko made a soft grunting sound as she shifted where she sat, her entire body turning away as if in denial of the unspoken end to Fate's statement. For the moment the younger girl simply ignored her and carried on.

"That girl, Nanoha, saved me. I said 'go away' and she ignored that. She only heard what I meant in my heart. - it was 'I don't want to be alone'." Fate's eyes closed as, for a moment, she simply basked in the memory of back then - the time when she found her first friend. Suddenly her eyes snapped open and she pinned Akiko with a gaze that was absolutely unyielding. "For me to live up to her example... It's too late to tell me to go away. Even if you scream for me to leave, even if you cry for me to go, even if you beg me to be silent... I'll just say - 'I'm here'."

Fate nodded towards the older girl. ""I may not have 'Devilish tools' like Nanoha, but I'm sure... if I tell you honestly enough and keep trying, you'll listen to me just like I listened to her."

* * *

><p>Thick clouds of steam wafted up from the trio of pots that gently bubbled away on the kitchen stove. Miso in one, thick sweet sauce in another and in the third boiling water within which floated a number of still-cooking dango dumplings. Underneath all that, sizzling under the oven's grill, was enough fish for everyone in the house – plus a bit extra in case anyone was really hungry that day.<p>

As Hayate fussed over the oven Signum stood beside her ready to do all those things the wheelchair bound girl needed doing but couldn't do very easily herself. At a quiet gesture from her master, a girl closer to her than family, the knight picked up a small slotted ladle and started to scoop the ready dumplings out onto a drying rack.

Since her nightmare she had been sticking closer than normal to her young master. Despite Hayate's reassurance the knight had found it... difficult... to let go of the feelings that her recent nightmare had evoked. Being reminded of her previous lives... her previous murderous existence... had been painful. That pain had made Hayate, the master who had saved her and the other knights from such an existence, all the more valuable to her.

The idea of being drawn back to that life of becoming the _murderer_she now feared herself to be... Signum honestly couldn't express how much that thought frightened her.

If she slipped back into being such a killer then that would simply validate everything the courts on Mid-Childa had already said about her... and not just her but Shamal, Vita and Zafira too. If it was only herself who would have to live with the consequences of such a thing then perhaps she could possibly bear it... but she knew that if _she_were proven a ruthless killer then their opponents on Mid-Childa would leap upon the chance to not only execute her but also her fellow knights as well.

The mere thought of what that would do to Hayate was just unthinkable.

The fact that the girl was a person so very close to her heart aside, such a result would also be a betrayal of _everything_which made her the knight she claimed to be. What kind of knight, really, was one that committed murder in cold blood? For her to return to that kind of existence simply meant that her honor and her loyalty would be only the first of the many casualties it would entail.

Not for the first time Signum was made uncomfortable by the question of what, if anything, she had to her name except her knighthood. Perhaps, she had wondered, this was what she truly feared? If she had nothing but her knighthood and her ability to fight then... then wasn't she just a killing machine as the Mid-Childan courts had tried to argue? Vita at least had her croquet, Shamal her research and love of gossip and even Zafira enjoyed going on fishing trips now and again. But herself? What did she ever do except fight and train?

How hard was it to avoid becoming a killer when all she ever did was prepare herself to be the best killer she could be?

Whatever answer Signum may have had to that rather philosophical issue was instantly forgotten when the wall behind her exploded inwards in a shower of brick fragments and clouds of dust. Without even stopping to think the knight threw herself between her master and whatever it was that had broken through the wall. Just as instantly one hand whipped up to clasp the pendant that was her devices storage mode and with a quickly hissed command she had gone from wearing a plain dress and apron to the full armored regalia of a Belkan knight.

Levantine rose up in her hand as she pointed it the direction of the hole and a shadow, likely the fool who had dared to attack the Yagami household, that she could see through the dust.

She growled ever so slightly

"Who dares?"

* * *

><p>"It should be around here..." Vita murmured as she peered at the latest wall the duo had come across. Somewhere on the other side of it she was sure she could sense Signum. Close too – maybe even literally on the other side of this wall. Which of course meant she would have to be careful when she smashed her way through since while she could detect Signum she couldn't tell what kind of condition the other knight was in.<p>

Hell, if Signum's situation was anything like Nanoha's had been then she could be in a bad way indeed – a bad way that wouldn't be improved were she to be hit by flying rubble. Even if she wasn't Vita was pretty sure her friend wouldn't appreciate being pelted with flying masonry.

"Over there should be good." She mumbled to herself as she half dragged Nanoha a short distance along the wall. Once there she hefted her weapon and eyed the wall critically... then paused and waved Nanoha back slightly before taking a gentle practice swing at the brickwork. If she hit it just right the shrapnel from the impact would be sent flying hopefully in a direction away from where she could sense her fellow knight. If she hit it slightly higher up then the amount of dust produced would almost double, providing a perfect screen in case there were hostiles Signum needed rescuing from... And wouldn't just just be a great thing to hold over the older knight's head? If she saved Signum from an actual threat then Vita knew she'd be able to win every argument with her comrade for the next few months at _least_.

Grinning to herself over that pleasant little thought the knight adjusted her aim slightly and then swung. Her aim was perfect – anyone else hitting the wall, even with the same strength as her, would be lucky to knock a couple of bricks out. Vita's strike instead blew out a hole the size of a small bus thanks to her having specifically aimed at a weakened point in the wall that she had spotted thanks to her pre-eminant skill and experience at demolition.

Breaking stuff was, after all, her specialty.

Within moments she was clambering over the broken brickwork that marked the base of the hole.

"Who dares?"

Vita blinked at the sound of Signum's voice before she grinned happily at having found the swordswoman. "Yo!" She called out, "Signum! You okay in there?"

"You shall not step closer, fiend!"

That... wasn't the response she was expecting. Hell, it wasn't a response that even made sense really. What it was however was a response that caused the iron knight's heart to speed up, her eyes to narrow and her linker core to pulse with what little strength it had remaining. Whoever it was that Signum was yelling at there could be no mistake that they were an enemy and while Vita doubted there was anyone on Earth who could match Signum going all out she knew that it was better to be safe than sorry. Especially with a defenseless Nanoha around.

Inwardly she was cursing the decision to aim for a bigger dust-screen when she demolished the wall behind her as right now she couldn't see who Signum was talking to.

Carefully she edged in the direction of Signum, making sure to angle herself in such a way that the wall was at her back to prevent an ambush.

Which was why, when Signum tried to cut her in half, she was only _barely_able to get Graf Eisen in the path of Levantine's swing.

"What the hell do you think you're doing!" She yelled out as she shifted her footing and pushed back against the older knight's weapon. Looking up she hissed in annoyance at the look of rage on Signum's face... then flinched as she caught sight if the _blankness_in her eyes. Whatever was going on it was obvious that Signum was being manipulated or controlled in some way. Given how violently the swordswoman had just attacked it was also pretty obvious that she wasn't going to be holding back. This was a point further proven when the taller woman suddenly stepped backwards and swung a great sweeping blow intended to slice through Vita's legs.

Swearing loudly Vita managed to recognize her opponent's move just in time to hop up and over the purple-and-steel device as it threatened to cut her legs out from under her. Immediately her mind was filled with thoughts as her body started to react automatically, the experience of long hours of sparring with Signum in the past having just become vital to her continued survival.

What exactly was going on? Who was controlling Signum? What the hell was she going to do about it?

Slipping to one side of an overhead swing Vita pushed those thoughts out of her mind in favor of a far more pressing one: _How do I survive the next few minutes?_

Vita didn't have any great illusions about how this fight was liable to end up. Not only was Signum the knight who focused the most on one-on-one combat but the older woman was also fresh and seemed uninjured... a rather worrying contrast to her own exhausted and battered frame. No, Vita _knew_she was going to lose this fight and she felt no shame in admitting that – were she at full strength then like hell would she have conceded defeat. In her current state it was a different story however.

But if she couldn't beat Signum...

Something was terribly wrong with the older knight and it was becoming rapidly obvious that unless that 'something' was dealt with then Signum was going to defeat her and then possibly do the same to Nanoha.

That... could not be allowed to happen.

Grunting with effort Vita swung Eisen in a wide arc at hip height that would force Signum to either block or dodge. Even with her current lack of power a direct hit from the Baron would be enough to injure Signum considerably, though it would be nothing she couldn't shake off after a minute or two.

Signum blocked, holding Levantine in a reverse grip with it's tip pointing towards the ground. It was, quite simply, using the one advantage Vita still held. She was short enough that most of her attacks would strike low on her opponent where they would be somewhat more difficult to block. Each time Signum blocked low, especially around the hips, she was forced to take a more unwieldy stance that was just a fraction or two slower to counter-attack from than normal.

In that fraction of a moment was Vita's chance to make a move.

She swung, Graf Eisen practically twisting around Signum's attempt to block. While her blade was able to catch Eisen's haft the positioning was simply so close to the knight's own body that Eisen's head was still able to impact against her shoulder... or at least it would have had Signum not stepped backwards at the last second. While the hammer still managed to clip her shoulder and would no doubt bruise the flesh of such horrendously it was not the arm-crippling hit that Vita had hoped for.

Worse, with her weapon extended in such a way the younger knight was wide open for when Signum counterattacked not with her weapon but instead with one of her armored boots. Vita's body simply doubled over around the kick and she all but choked as her breath was violently forced out of her by the blow. Like that she simply had no way to defend herself as something solid, Levantine's pommel most likely, smashed into the back of her skull. Stars filled her vision as she tumbled forwards.

How stupid had that been? She should have _known_that Signum would know of the weaknesses in her own style and how to defend them properly!

But she wasn't dead yet – and she knew Signum would know it. Which meant her fellow knight was inevitably going to try to fix that problem since, for whatever reason, she apparently thought Vita to be her enemy.

As she fell Vita threw both arms out to break her fall... but the moment they touched the ground she deliberately allowed one to simply collapse under her. This in turn caused her straight fall to almost instantly be turned into a sideways roll just in time for Signum's downward stab to miss her by mere inches. Though her head still ached and her vision seemed to swim in and out of focus Vita was able, though simple pure determination, to hook her own weapon around the purple and steel blade.

"Oi," she hissed, "Signum... _watch this_. Eisen!"

"**Jawohl! Racketenform!"**

The hammer transformed in a split second before newly formed rockets at the back of it's head ignited and blasted the weapon across the room. Above Vita, Signum swore as Levantine was simply ripped from her grasp thanks to the hammer having been caught onto the sword when it went shooting off.

Vita smirked at the successful disarming of her opponent... only to curse in pain as Signum immediately tried to smash her skull into the floor by stomping on it with one armor-clad boot. Fortunately she got her arms up to block just in time but still the force behind the blow left her in agony, one that only increased when the boot came down again.

* * *

><p>Across the room where she stood all but cowering away from the fight, something within Nanoha seemed to twitch slightly at the sight of Signum kicking at the downed Vita.<p>

_How unfriendly..._

She stiffened at the sound of the voice – her voice – as it spoke to her from somewhere over behind her shoulder. Immediately she twisted to look but saw nothing other than the ruined brickwork from Vita's earlier entry method. A grunt of pain from Vita, and the solid sound of boot on flesh, caused Nanoha to turn back to the scene of one of her-

_belongings_

-one of her _friends_being beaten on by another. Slowly one of her hands reached up to where Raising Heart hung at her neck... only for it to freeze half way there. What was she going to do? Shoot them? Would she once again simply resort to violence like... like she always did? Isn't that what got everyone into this in the first place? She had been so intent on going out and dealing with the Factory that she hadn't even thought to find out what it could do. She'd just rushed in guns blazing thinking that enough firepower would solve everything.

Of course she had also pulled both Vita and Signum along for the ride... and just looking at the state the two were in now made Nanoha keenly aware that it was all _her_fault they were here. She should have held back! She should have let Lindy do her job, should have let her examined the whole situation first! At least then she, Vita and Signum wouldn't have gone into the factory blind and without support!

_It's our fault. All our fault._

Nanoha hissed slightly as she heard her own voice whisper in her ear once more.

_Lindy told us not to come here but we didn't listen, did we?_

It was true... Lindy had told her to go home and not go on the offensive. But the only thing that had been on her mind at the time was the sound of Akiko's hysterical voice as she had... had told Nanoha how terrible the Nightmare Factory was. Akiko had _told_her that this place was a house of horrors – but she'd simply ignored it because... because...

_Because we decided that we knew best, just like we always do. Isn't that why we make everyone listen to us?_

"Th-that's not-!" Though she protested, loudly, Nanoha knew it was meaningless. The voice was _right_ – that was why it's words, and the words of her earlier double, hurt so much. No matter how much Nanoha denied them she knew that they were true. She _was_ a bully. She _didn't_ listen. She _did_ believe she knew better. She _was_at fault. "That's..."

A yell from Vita made her look up, her eyes widening slightly as she realized that Signum was looking directly at her. Her vocal protest had obviously caught the attention of the disarmed sword knight who even now was stepping over her downed opponent in order to approach. The tall woman only made it a few steps towards Nanoha before she stumbled slightly and looked back in annoyance – back at where Vita, despite her injuries, had stretched out to wrap her arms around Signum's legs.

"Nanoha!" The red-head yelled, her voice somewhat slurred from the beating she had been receiving moments ago. "Run!" Summoning what energy she could the young-seeming knight tried to tighten her grip on Signum's legs in the hope of completely pulling the older woman to the ground. Unfortunately the sword knight had the advantage in height, strength and in simply not having been both exhausted and beaten to hell like Vita was.

Nanoha simply froze, staring at the sight of Vita ordering her to run as Signum moved to break free. "Why?" She whispered. "Why would you... I-I'm not someone you should be sav-"

"**Master, Control Please**"

Raising Heart's voice simply cut Nanoha's words of self-loathing off almost completely.

"**Enemy vocal action detected**" The device stated as it's master looked down in shock at where it hung, in standby mode, from her neck. "**Enemy in error. Disregard. Please call to return 'set up'**"

"R-raising Heart..." Nanoha began, her voice hesitant - it wasn't often that her device spoke up entirely of it's own accord after all.

"**Enemy statements deceptive.**"

"B-but... but they're _true_!" The orange-haired girl all but wailed. "I _am_ a horrible person! I _am_ a bully! What I _did_... to Fate... I... I..." Eyes, filled with tears, rose up to stare out at where Vita was valiently holding the berserk Signum back. "Why would _anyone_want to help someone like me!"

"**Because.**" Raising Heart began, "**My master is not in error.**"

"Wh... wha-" Nanoha started, only to be cut off as her device flared with pinkish-red light.

"**It is okay.**" It declared, it's semi-mechanical voice seemign to raise in volume as it spoke. "**Master is a devil when need be. Master is a friend from the beginning. Vita has observed both sides and calls both 'friend'.**"

Nanoha's eyes widened at her device's speech and at the way it struck home in her mind. "Raising Heart..."

"**I also call My Master 'My Friend'.**" The device paused for a moment, it's light pulsing rapidly before it began speaking again. "**Master's kindness, master's courage, master's wisdom are from a good person. Please trust yourself Master.**"

"But... The things I've done... It's all my fault..."

"**If so, we have responsibility to make things better.**"

For several long moments Nanoha seemed to stare into space as Raising Heart's words echoed around her head. Finally she seemed to return to the present and, for the first time since meeting her double, a small smile passed across her face. "Take responsibility..." She murmured. "... Is it really that simple?"

"**Does the complication matter?**"

"No..." The girl smiled slightly as she rose up, no longer looking like the beaten girl she had been a few moments ago. "I suppose it doesn't." Her face took on a determined look as she glared out as Signum and Vita. "I guess I should take responsibility for this first. For bringing everyone here without thinking ahead or listening to everyone else as I should have done." Quickly her eyes drifted away from the two struggling knights and over to where the one other figure in the room, the one Signum has referred to as 'Hayate', lay. It was clear, to her, that this was most likely the thing responsible for Signum's current crazed actions.

"Raising Heart!" Nanoha declared, tugging the red jewel and it's necklace mount away from her neck – the rear of the necklace simply breaking apart to let it free. "Set up!"

"**Call of 'Set up' is accepted.**" Raising Heart acknowledged, and as the light of her magic rose around her, added, "**Glad to be back, My Master.**"

* * *

><p>Signum swore under her breath as the other intruder, the one not currently wrapped around her legs, suddenly exploded with power. A familiar power too – one that set her heart racing as, on some level, she knew she had experienced this power before... and she knew it had been as an enemy.<p>

Strange.

While she knew that power had the _feel_ of someone she knew she had fought before she couldn't seem to remember _who_. Her memories of the time before Hayate were foggy at best, if not outright missing, as a result of the memory wipe the Book of Darkness had inflicted on herself and her fellow knights. That meant, she was sure, that for her to even remember this enemy it must have been someone she had fought after Hayate had called upon herself and the Wolkenritter.

But she couldn't remember fighting _anyone_who felt like this.

Come to that... she couldn't remember anyone she had fought at all.

She knew she had fought people since she knew that was the only way to get pages for the book before... before...

Before what?

She remembered a time when she needed to recover pages for the Book of Darkness and she remembered a time when she didn't need to do the same for the Tome of the Night Sky... But she couldn't seem to remember anything in between such as why pages were no longer needed or why the name of the book had changed.

It was dawning on Signum that something was wrong. Really wrong even – parts of her memory seemed to be actively missing for no reason she could determine...

Was someone messing with her mind?

While such things were really more Shamal's expertise than her own , Signum was growing more and more certain that her conclusion was correct. Someone, or something, was playing tricks on her mi-

"Si-signum... he-help..."

For a moment Signum's mind blanked out as the sound of Hayate's clearly pained plea reached her ears. Her head snapped instinctively towards the direction the cry had come from and the moment her eyes caught sight of where Hayate lay they widened in horror.

Hayate was _bleeding_.

Her master, her queen, was _injured_.

A tiny part of her mind screamed out at this. Screamed that Hayate's injuries didn't make _sense_. That neither of the two monsters she believed herself to be fighting had so much as drawn close enough to even _touch_ Hayate, let alone injure her! That there was something _wrong_, some kind of trickery or deception or...

But it didn't matter what that part of her mind thought. No matter how hard it screamed it was easily drowned out by the single minded _rage_that the mere sight of an injured Hayate caused to bloom within Signum. Fresh energy, fed by her anger, flooded through the knight's body and with it she simply ripped her legs free of the arms that held them immobile. She paused for a moment only to stamp harshly down on one of the arms, the clear crack of snapping bone indicating that this opponent wouldn't be pinning her again.

Magic flooded out around her body and anchored itself to the surrounding space before slinging her, catapult-like, in the direction of where her weapon lay. As she shot past her weapon one hand reached out to snatch the silver and purple device up and almost instantly Signum both skidded to a halt and spun in place to face the direction Hayate was in. Another flash of magic sent her shooting off to end up standing just in front of Hayate, between her master and the monster that _must_have been responsible for hurting her!

"Levantine," The knight hissed as she glared at her opponent. "No mercy."

"**Schlagenform!**"

* * *

><p>Signum was fast. <em>Insanely<em>fast.

Before this fight Nanoha had never quite understood why Fate had needed to redesign her barrier jacket for speed. Now, however, it was clear to her that even to someone as fast as Fate... well... Signum was in a whole different league.

Fortunately it was quickly apparent that while Signum possessed all her strength and speed her actual skill was being hampered by whatever force was affecting her mind. There were points where the knight had possessed a clear advantage and rather than pressing it for all it was worth she had fallen back into a defensive position. She also didn't seem willing to move too far away from the black figure she kept referring to as 'Hayate'. Given that it wasn't hard for Nanoha to guess that, in Signum's mind, the figure actually was Hayate. Being the only other thing in the room it was also the only real suspect as to who or what was messing with Signum's mind.

Clearly it had to go.

Unfortunately with Signum fully under the belief that the figure was Hayate that was going to easier said than done. There was no way that the knight would simply let Nanoha take it out given these circumstances.

Were she against almost any other combatant Nanoha would have been content to sit back and simply shell the area from afar with bombardment-class spells. She knew that Signum couldn't actually block a _Divine Buster_for instance... but the knight didn't need to as every time Nanoha tried to set herself up to fire she found herself under immediate attack from Signum's whip-like sword. This inevitably forced her to cancel her preparation in favor of frantic casting of shields and barriers in order to avoid being sliced to ribbons.

Mentally she made a note to practice those later – if she ever needed to fight Signum again then shaving even a second off of her casting time would be invaluable. Physically she set up a quick brace of divine shooter shots and unleashed them in a wide pattern except for two which she angled up in order to drop them down on the fake Hayate while the rest distracted her opponent.

As she had expected Signum didn't rise to the bait of the spread and instead dropped back to slice both high-angle shots out of the air with her device. Without thinking further Nanoha jinked to the left as her remaining shots hit the ground and threw up clouds of dust and debris that obscured the knight. A split second later, before Nanoha was even completely out of the way, the end of Levantine shot from out of the dust and slashed through the space she had vacated. Luckily for her the only thing the weapon caught was a trailing edge of her barrier jacket's skirt, which the blade cut through without stopping... Nanoha had no illusions about what would happen it the weapon caught her dead on. The strength of her barrier jacket was impressive but she was keenly aware that it was simply not good enough to stop the power Signum was currently putting into her attacks.

If only she could hold Signum down for a bit! Long enough to set up a divine buster at least! Even if Signum blocked it then the backwash from the attack would hopefully be enough to damage the figure messing with her mind!

The only way Nanoha could see to get the time for that was to bind the knight. The problem was that Signum was simply too fast to catch in a Restrict Lock... which had been a rather nasty surprise as she wasn't exactly used to people simply _dodging_ her binds. Worse was that while her other main binding technique, Hoop Bind, was fast enough to catch Signum it wasn't strong enough to hold the knight long enough to do _anything_before she broke out.

How she wished Yuuno or Shamal were here right now! Both excelled in binding techniques and surely would have had something that combined strength and speed enough to catch and hold Signum. Even Chrono would be a good person to see as he had quite the range of binding techniques himself. If only she had some kind of suppo-

_"Nanoha?"_

The young girl jerked slightly in surprise at the unexpected telepathic message before immediately cutting her flight for a brief moment. That moment resulted in a sharp and sudden fall which prevented, barely, her from being skewered on the end of Levantine as Signum attempted to take advantage of her surprised distraction.

Nanoha was rather beginning to suspect that Signum had been holding back during the Book of Darkness incident. Given that back then the knight had been trying _not_to kill anyone... this was probably true.

_"Shamal?"_ Nanoha responded, reactivating her flight magic and darting off to circle around where Signum stood guard. _"I... I didn't think you could get through..."_

_"Well... we have the Athra relaying communications now, but it took them a while to break through the interference in there."_ Shamal's mental voice responded, a vague feeling of apology making itself known along with it. Telepathy often betrayed people's feelings like that, much in a similar way to how a person's tone of voice did the same in normal speech. After a moment the feeling of apology morphed into one of unease. The sense of unease quickly increased as Shamal, on the other end of the telepathic communication line, let some of her worry seep into her projected thoughts. _"Is everything... What's going on in there? I tried to contact Vita and Signum but..."_

_"Vita is injured."_ Nanoha's response was quick and to the point – mostly because she simply didn't have enough attention to spare on explaining further. For someone who wasn't really a ranged fighter Signum was doing a damn good job of keeping her at bay from a distance. _"Signum is... She's under mind control or something I think, I'm fighting her now."_ There was a slight pause as the young made was forced to do a quick barrel roll to avoid an arrow of light that almost speared her. _"I'm... I'm not winning."_

Admitting that was a little difficult but it was also the truth. Signum was using lethal attacks and Nanoha hadn't exactly been in the best state when she went into this battle. It didn't help that Signum simply wasn't tiring while she herself was – with Signum's skill keeping her from setting up a decisive blow or two the battle had become one of attrition, one that Nanoha knew she would lose eventually.

_"Hold on,"_ Shamal fell silent for several long moments before her mental voice continued, _"I think I can send some help... but you'll need to hold still long enough for the Athra to lock your position for me!"_

Hold still?

_Hold still!_

That... was a tall order indeed as staying still for even a few moments was an incredibly risky prospect right now. Were she any other young girl then perhaps Nanoha would have complained or asked Shamal to come up with a different plan. Instead she merely sighed slightly, squared her shoulders and began mentally preparing a plan of defense. If staying still in the face of Signum's wrath was what Shamal needed her to do in order to save herself and her friends... then staying still was what Nanoha was going to do.

A quick burst of magic pushed her up and over the area Signum was defending where she was able to take a quick moment to scan for where Vita was before an arrow of energy forced her to roll away. Some artful dodging after that soon led her towards her fallen friend where she simply dropped to the ground, turned to face Signum and then threw up a shield.

Then another. And another.

By the time she was finished a string of seven maximum power shields, the most she could manage, sat between her and the swordswoman. Nanoha's arms shook quite violently from the strain – defensive techniques weren't exactly her specialty to begin with and in her current condition that many of them was enough to push her almost beyond her limits.

Moments later the end shield simply exploded as Levantine, thrown forward in an overpowered thrust by it's wielder, smashed through it without so much as slowing down. The same happened to the second shield... and the third... then the fourth... Nanoha gritted her teeth and tried to drag up more power to pump into the remaining shields. Even with this effort the remaining shields didn't even seem to register to Signum as the power behind her thrust simply pierced through them. In response Nanoha grit her teeth, held her ground and as Levantine made contact with her final shield layer she dug deep within herself and poured everything she had into preventing Signum from breaking through.

She failed.

The terrible blade that belonged to the knight of swords slowed and ground to a halt as it hit Nanoha's final shield... but only for a few moments as it was then that Nanoha was reminded of the fear she had felt back when she had first encountered the Belkan knights... and the power of their cartridge systems. The rear of Levantine exploded, a spent cartridge case being ejected just as the weapon and it's owner surged forwards thanks to the sudden boost of magical power. Instantly Nanoha responded in kind only to feel a brand new spark of terror at the dull click that met her order rather than the expected explosion and rush of power.

She... She'd run out of cartridges?

_Impossible!_

She knew she had been keeping track of them! She'd used a few during her initial search of the factory, and... and... and she couldn't remember exactly what had happened after her duplicate had showed up...

Had she used some cartridges then? She couldn't recall.

Not that it mattered now. Signum had just penetrated her final barrier and that left only her barrier jacket standing between herself and a messy impalement and if she had to be honest... her jacket didn't stand a chance. Thankfully her jacket had a response for this kind of problem. The moment it hit it's limit then the inbuilt purge protocol would kick in and cause it to explode like reactive armor. If nothing else the explosion would push her out of the way at the last second. The only problem was that such an act would also disrupt the lock the _Athra_was trying to make on her.

If that happened then she would need to start the whole process all over... and she didn't think she was capable of doing so.

With a thought Nanoha turned the reactor purge protocol off, screwed her eyes shut, and _hoped_ that Shamal and the _Athra_were going to be fast enough.

A few moments later, when certain death failed to occur, Nanoha opened her eyes. Her vision was instantly filled with a wall of navy blue – a wall that she soon realized was actually someone's back. Surprise at it's proximity made her take a step backwards, which moved her viewpoint enough to take in more of the back's owner. Messy white hair, bronzed skin, muscles upon muscles...

"Zafira...?" She began, realizing that yes it was indeed the male Wolkenritter standing before her right now. Nanoha normally had little interaction with the man – or the wolf she knew him better as – beyond standard pleasantries whenever she visited Hayate but... right now she couldn't have been more glad to see him if she tried.

The man grunted, causing a wet squelching sound that made Nanoha glance down... to where a good hand's width of Levantine's blade protruded from Zafira's lower back.

She gasped.

Zafira's ear twitched slightly at the noise before he shrugged. "It's not so bad," he murmured to the girl behind him, "just a flesh wound, it will heal." That was all the man said before he turned his attention back to Signum via the simple act of punching her in the chest. The swordswoman recoiled from the heavy blow and staggered backwards, her sword pulling free from Zafira's body in the process. If it hurt then the wolf knight didn't show it as the moment the sword was free he stepped forwards, batted the bloody blade to one side, and kicked Signum in the stomach.

Moments later she bounced off the far wall of the room, the force of Zafira's kick having simply launched her into it like a living missile.

Nanoha, to put it mildly, was stunned. In the space of only a few seconds Zafira had done to Signum what she had been unable to do throughout her entire fight with the woman. Still, she was thankful for the man's appearance and even more thankful for his strength. If nothing else then his appearance was enough to let her catch her breath and consider the situation for a moment without distraction.

She fell back towards where Vita lay while doing her best to keep her eyes on the fight as it unfolded. Signum was already back on her feet and defending herself as Zafira closed the gap and pressed his attack. It didn't take long for Nanoha to pick out the method Zafira was using to fight his opponent – a method she began to file away in the back of her head just in case she needed to face Signum again. The wolfman was simply forcing his way in close, too close for Signum to properly strike him with the blade of Levantine. Instead she was forced to use her own strike arts as well as a variety of pommel strikes to respond and it was clear that she was at a disadvantage when fighting that way. It was an effective method to use against the knight but it was not exactly one that Nanoha felt she would be able to use herself.

Worse... The longer Nanoha watched the more she began to see that, despite Zafira's apparent advantage, the fight was going to be close. Close enough that she wasn't sure who would win. Even with the disadvantage and fatigue she faced Signum was a _monster_of a combatant capable of simply taking Zafira's strikes head on and replying to them almost as harshly.

No, it was obvious that leaving their fight to reach it's own conclusion would be a chancy thing at best. If that was the case then the only reasonable course of action would be to make the results of the fight a non-issue... and on that matter Nanoha already knew what to do.

Raising Heart snapped down to point at the dark figure in the center of the room - the one Signum believed to be Hayate. With Zafira keeping the swordswoman busy there was nothing to stop Nanoha from simply dealing with the root cause of the problem.

"Lock on target." Magic flared around Nanoha's feet as she drew on what reserves she had left. "Set ring barrel to minimum, maximum range fifteen meters." That would be more than enough range to take out the target. A longer range would perhaps create an escape route... but given she wasn't sure if Shamal still had barriers up outside to stop any collateral damage it was probably safer to er on the side of caution. Besides, she didn't know if she had the power left for anything much larger.

"**Target Set. Barrel Set. Range Set. All Clear For Buster.**"

"Ah." The girl took a deep breath. Over on the far side of the room Signum picked up on what she was about to do and broke away from Zafira only to come to a crashing halt as the man simply transformed and sank his teeth into the back of one leg. There was no way for her to stop Nanoha now. "Full power! Divine Buster!"

The pink-haired knight screamed.

* * *

><p>For a moment, one glorious and blessed moment, Signum's mind shut down completely as she watched the wave of pink magic simply roll over where Hayate lay. In that single moment there was no pain. There was no anger. There was no despair. Quite simply her mind had no idea what it was supposed to feel having been shocked so badly by the sight before her.<p>

Had she the choice then perhaps the knight would have wished that her mind remain in that state. Sadly the moment of emptiness was just a moment and it was one that ended as quickly as it had come. The void in Signum's mind was replaced with horror. Horror and despair and pain and everything else negative simply flooded into her spirit within the barest fraction of a second.

She didn't even notice that she was screaming.

All she could take in was the sight in front of her eyes.

Hayate.

Dead.

_Hayate._

Dead.

Hayate was dead!

Hayate was dead and it was all her fault for not protecting her! Hayate had been _relying_on Signum to protect her and she had failed!

Slowly her eyes tracked across the room away from where Hayate had been vaporized and over to the one that had been behind the magic that did it. Horror was replaced by rage as she rose to her feet, heedless of the injury to her leg, and surged forward with an inarticulate scream of anger.

Something heavy landed on her back then, forcing her to the ground even as she did her best to hack and slash away at the _monster_that has taken Hayate from her. She screamed, she swore, she hurled abuse in Belkan, Japanese, Mid-Childan and every other language she knew. As best she could she tried to stab the thing on her back only to find a large hand grabbing her sword-arm by the wrist and pinning to down.

She screamed some more.

She felt a pain in the back of her head.

And then, thankfully, nothing.

* * *

><p>Nanoha let out a breath she hadn't been aware of holding as Zafira landed on Signum's back, pinned her sword arm to the ground with one hand and then slammed his other elbow into the back of her head. The swordswoman's struggling ceased then as, no doubt, the guardian beast had just knocked her unconscious. Nanoha never thought she would have felt so glad to see one of her friends taken down but the crazed Signum had been <em>terrifying<em>and now that she was out cold she was much less so.

She watched as Zafira slid off of Signum's back and, with barely a grunt of effort, lifted the comatose woman up in order to position her over one of his massive shoulders. As she watched a little bell went off in the back of her head – she had forgotten about Vita! Almost immediately her head whipped around to look in the direction of where Vita was... not laying...

"Yo." The short knight was sitting a little out of the way where she'd apparently dragged herself out of the way as soon as Signum had started fighting Nanoha. She nodded to the young ace when the girl turned to look and she probably would have waved if it wasn't for her being forced to cradle her broken arm with her still good one. Vita smiled slightly, though it was a little strained, "Glad to have you back."

Nanoha smiled back in an equally strained way – it was hard to look at the redhead and _not_ think about the fact that Vita was only injured because of her. It was hard to remember exactly what had happened after she had... had _given in_to the monster that wore her face but she could at least remember that it was Vita who had rescued and protected her.

_Of course she did. She's such a _good_ friend that way._

The treacherous thought flitted across Nanoha's mind and she winced in response. It made her think back to all the things the other-her had said that she... she just couldn't seem to deny. Not to mention that it also made her think of all the other thoughts she had earlier as well as the guilt those thoughts filled her with.

"I'm sorry." She mumbled, looking away from Vita as she spoke. Moments later she felt a large hand place itself on her shoulder. Surprised by the contact she spun in place and found herself looking up at Zafira who, somehow, had come up behind her without her noticing.

"Do not worry." The white-haired stated as he nodded towards Vita. "She is one of the Wolkenritter, and we are..." He paused for a moment and looked as if he was trying to think of how to phrase what he wanted to say. "... more durable than humans. Her arm will not bother her long." Then he smirked slightly. "Though she may whine about it later."

Nanoha blinked, then frowned. "But that's not-"

"I don't _whine_" Groused the shorter knight as she shifted her broken arm until she could hook her thumb into one of the pockets on the front of her armor's outer coat. That done she was able to use her good arm to help her stand up – though it was clear by the way she both winced and muttered curses under her breath that the movement hurt like hell. By the time she was standing Zafira was giving her a look of mild amusement while Nanoha's look was that of horror. Vita looked at the young Ace and shrugged. "It's not too bad," she stated before she caught Zafira's expression and scowled at the man, "and that was _not_whining!"

The man smirked slightly, much to Vita's annoyance, before his expression turned serious. "We should leave now. There seems to be nothing more to learn here other than our own folly."

"You know the way out?" Vita glanced around as she asked, "I haven't been able to get my bearings at all in here."

Zafira shrugged, "dimensional transfer. I will contact Shamal then she will contact the Athra for assistance." The man paused and both Nanoha and Vita waited as his eyes glazed over slightly – one of the more obvious signs of heavy telepathic communication – for a moment before he blinked and his eyes returned to normal. "Stand close and I shall set up a target for a remote transfer."

Even as Zafira spoke a ring of pale blue light formed at his feet before it resolved itself into the familiar triangular shape of a Belkan style magic circle. Both Nanoha and Vita shuffled slightly so that they were both within the bounds of the circle. Once they were there Zafira nodded once and let his magic flare up, the mystic circle brightening until it almost hurt to look at. Then, without warning, it simply vanished and was instantly replaced with a larger and far more complex circle outlined in pale green.

This too flared... and then the factory around them vanished.

* * *

><p>The world lurched violently and Nanoha felt herself stumble and stagger as she appeared outside the Factory only a few feet away from where she had blown a hole in the outer wall to gain entry earlier. Her head spun and she soon found herself on her knees and rather violently emptying her stomach over the floor. She'd been teleported before, several times in fact, but each of those instances had been quick and easy. This time she felt like she had just been violently swung around and around as if on some crazy carnival ride. Coughing at the foul taste left in her mouth the young girl glanced back to where Zafira and Vita both stood looking as if they had both barely noticed the turbulence. Nearby were both Shamal and Signum, the former kneeling kneeling over and examining where the latter was now laid out on the floor.<p>

A momentary flicker of annoyance passed through Nanoha's head. Zafira, or Shamal, could have at least warned her that it was going to be a rough ride! Either of them should have known about that from Shamal's teleporting of Zafira _into_the Factory earlier!

_They need to learn a good hard lesson about friendshi-_

Nanoha's eyes widened in shock before they screwed themselves shut as she clamped down hard on that thought. It wasn't really either of their faults that they hadn't told her the transport would be turbulent – Zafira looked as if he had barely noticed it after all. Maybe neither had realized that it was as bad as it was because of that?

Yes. That was... that was reasonable. Neither Zafira nor Shamal had done it on purpose. It was just a mistake, an oversight of theirs, that was all. Nothing worth getting annoyed over and definitely nothing unfriendly on their parts.

When a hand brushed against her back Nanoha almost jumped in fight. She'd been so absorbed in arguing against herself that she hadn't even noticed someone approaching! Fortunately a quick glance confirmed that someone to be Shamal, who had finished with Signum for the moment and even now was crouching down to get a better look at Nanoha instead.

"Are you alright?" The blonde woman asked, concern clear over her face, "I... that transfer was... there was just so much interference..." Nanoha shook her head slightly as the taller woman helped her up and, thankfully, gave her something to wipe her mouth with.

She smiled slightly at the green knight. "It's okay. I'm okay." As she reassured Shamal she felt a pleasant tingling feeling sweep over her, a feeling she recognized as the that of healing magic. Along with it came a wave of relief as all the cuts, scrapes and bruises she had picked up all faded away under the spell's effect. There was still some lingering muscle pain and general exhaustion but those were nothing that a good rest wouldn't fix.

Except she couldn't rest quite yet, not while there was still something that needed doing. Turning to look back at the Factory building, and the hole she and Vita had blown in the side of it earlier, Nanoha frowned. Like it was there was nothing stopping anyone from simply wandering in to investigate the damage and if anyone else were to find themselves facing the... the _things_within then Nanoha knew she would never be able to forgive herself for letting it happen.

"We need to level this place." Vita's sudden statement, one that echoed her own feelings on the matter, made Nanoha nod in agreement. The Factory as well as the traps and monsters within needed to be taken down to ensure the safety of the locals... and the safety of the girl back at Fate's home.

_Lying to ourself again. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. You're just afraid of going back inside._

"I... we should do it from outside." Nanoha said after a moment. Though she was ignoring the voice in her head it's accusation had struck a nerve – she really was afraid. Afraid of how the Factory, or the monsters inside it at least, had managed to get inside her head so easily. It was hard for her to imagine that Akiko could have been fighting these things for so long if just _one_encounter was enough to leave her feeling like this.

Then again, given the state of the older girl... perhaps it wasn't so hard after all.

"Is that so." When Vita spoke up Nanoha was surprised to find the girl looking at her oddly but she quickly turned away to look at the Factory instead. "It's a good idea though. _I_sure as hell don't want to go back inside, not in this condition." She paused, then grunted in annoyance. "Can't do much from out here like this either. I don't really have anything suited to taking the place down. Nothing I can use one-handed anyway."

Nanoha felt within herself for a moment, essentially flexing her linker core in order to test it. The sharp spike of pain that this resulted in made her wince slightly before she shook her head. "I... I don't think I could manage anything big enough right now either."

"Well... uh..." Vita floundered for a bit before she looked up at the man the other side of her. "Zafira?"

"Maybe." The large knight folded his arms over his chest as he considered the situation. "Steel Yoke, full propagation, maximum expansion. Should take out walls, floors and ceilings... major structural supports or reinforced rooms might be resistant." he shrugged in apology. "It's not really an anti-structure spell."

"It will have to do." Shamal cut in as she came up behind the trio, "I've been looking over Signum and I really would rather get her home as soon as possible. That goes for everyone else too – I don't know about you all but keeping up these barriers and needing to push through all that interference has almost worn me out."

The shortest of the three knights considered this for a moment before she nodded. "Fine." She stated, motioning with her good hand for Zafira to get on with things. "Me and Eisen can knock down anything left standing after you wreck the place. We can do that much at least."

As the wolfman stepped forwards Nanoha perked up slightly in order to watch him at work. She had only seen Zafira casting actual _spells_a handful of times – most of which had been during the fight against the Book of Darkness's defense program some time ago. Casually she leaned forward slightly to better see as Zafira summoned up a light blue Belkan style magic circle, lifted one foot, then stamped down hard.

As soon as his foot touched the ground the pavement in front of him exploded upwards as a solid white spike burst out from underneath it. Not even a moment later another spike did the same then another and another until they formed a clustered trail of spikes which made its way from Zafira to the open hole in the Factory wall. The moment they passed the threshold of the building their behavior changed as the trail of spikes immediately spread outwards in all directions. They also grew larger and it quickly became apparent that further spikes were starting to burst out of the original spikes like branches and leaves on some kind of demented, and deadly, plantlife.

It wasn't long before Nanoha spotted cracks spreading along the outside walls as spikes began to push their way through the brickwork. The effect was more obvious in other places where windows, vents and other weaker spots exploded outwards thanks to the spell. Even higher up she could see where chunks of the roof were dislodged by the growing mass of impaling magic that presumably was now filling every scrap of space within the building.

She vaguely wondered what the spell had done to anything left inside the building.

It disturbed her slightly to realize how difficult she found it to care.

The sound of falling masonry drew her attention back to the Factory building just in time to see one of the walls and a good chunk of the roof sag inwards. Nanoha noted immediately that the spikes were all fading away now, leaving the structure riddled with holes and unable to support it's own weight properly. Clouds of dust and debris billowed out of the building and filled the air as it collapsed in on itself. Fortunately none of the debris hit anyone there thanks to a protection field Shamal put up to deflect it all at the last moment. The field remained up for a good while until the dust had more or less settled. When it fell the group was treated to the welcome sight of what was essentially now just a very large pile of rubble dotted here and there by the odd pillar or section of wall that had been resistant enough to remain standing.

Vita stared at the rubble for a while.

"Huh." She eventually murmured, "not bad."


	6. Chapter 6

Due to conflicts of interest at odds with the continued health of the project I have decided to step down from my position as editor and host of the Battle Fantasia Project. Note that this does not entail the end of the project nor the discontinuation of hosting on ; future installments will be hosted by the author "Battle Fantasia Posting Staff", id number 1660001. Please update your favorites and alerts accordingly.


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